MacKenzie Scott's HBCU Giving Contrasts Starkly With Historical White Funders

By Tyrone McKinley Freeman, Associate Professor of Philanthropic Studies, Director of Undergraduate Programs, Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, IUPUI. First published on The Conversation

Novelist and billionaire philanthropist MacKenzie Scott has so far given at least US$560 million to 23 historically Black colleges and universities. These donations are part of a bid she announced in 2019 to quickly dedicate most of her fortune to charity.

Scott’s gifts, including the $6 million she donated to Tougaloo College in Mississippi and the $45 million she gave North Carolina A&T University, vary in size but nearly all of the colleges and universities describe this funding as “historic.” For many, it was the largest single donation they had ever received from an individual donor.

Scott, previously married to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, is not making a splash just because of the size of her donations. She has an unusually unrestrictive get-out-of-the-way approach.

“I gave each a contribution and encouraged them to spend it on whatever they believe best serves their efforts,” Scott wrote in a July 2020 blog post.

She sees the standard requirements that universities and other organizations report to funders on their progress as burdensome distractions. Instead of negotiating detailed agreements before making a gift, she works with a team of advisers to stealthily vet a wide array of nonprofits, colleges and universities from afar before surprising them with her unprecedented multimillion-dollar gifts that come without any strings attached.

Scott is also supporting students of color through donations to the United Negro College Fund and the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, which give HBCU students scholarships, and by supporting many other colleges and universities that enroll large numbers of minority students.

Her approach sharply contrasts with how many wealthy white donors have interacted with Black-serving nonprofits, including HBCUs, in the past. As a historian of philanthropy, I have studied the paternalism of white funders, including those who helped many of these schools open their doors.

HBCU Origins

The first HBCUs were founded in Northern states before the Civil War, including Cheyney and Lincoln universities in Pennsylvania and Wilberforce University in Ohio. After the war, most HBCUs were established in Southern states. These institutions were lifelines for Black Americans seeking higher education during decades of Jim Crow segregation that locked them out of other colleges and universities. (Disclosure: I earned my bachelor’s degree at Lincoln University.)

Although many white philanthropists made large gifts to these schools, their support was fraught with prejudice. Initially, white funders pushed for HBCUs to emphasize vocational training, then called “industrial education,” such as blacksmithing, printing and shoemaking, over more intellectual pursuits.

White philanthropists including Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller had poured millions from their fortunes into the proliferation of Black industrial schools by the early 20th century. The HBCUs Hampton University in Virginia and Tuskegee University in Alabama, which received donations from Scott, were leading models of industrial education for decades.

Black students during a class on the assembly and repair of telephones at Hampton Institute (1899). US Library of Congress.

The vocational curriculum at these schools was promoted as preparing Black students to be skilled laborers and academic teachers. During this era, however, most graduates worked as unskilled laborers or vocational teachers.

White Southerners overwhelmingly approved of this arrangement, which left many HBCU grads on the bottom rung of society rather than making them educated citizens. Emphasizing industrial education at HBCUs preserved the superior economic status of white Americans and the racist system of segregation. But African Americans’ educational aspirations required much more.

W.E.B. Du Bois, a prominent Black intellectual, was a leading critic of the funding HBCUs got from wealthy whites. He said: “Education is not and should not be a private philanthropy; it is a public service and whenever it merely becomes a gift of the rich it is in danger.”

In 1904, the HBCU leader Mary McLeod Bethune, founder of Florida’s Daytona Normal and Industrial School for Negro Girls – now Bethune Cookman University – felt this pressure. She placed “industrial” in her school’s name to attract white funding. But she sought to give Black students a liberal arts education that she believed would support their full citizenship.

Decades later, the sociologist Charles S. Johnson served as Fisk University’s first Black president, starting in 1946. He sought to turn that Tennessee HBCU, founded in 1866, into a powerhouse of Black liberal arts education in partnership with white philanthropists and foundations rather than covertly.

HBCU leaders have, in short, faced a predicament for generations: When rich white donors offer big donations, can the money truly be used to support Black educational interests and goals?

Prejudiced Backlash

When HBCUs secured funding early on, that money was often jeopardized because of bigotry.

In 1887, for example, the Georgia state Legislature withdrew $8,000, worth approximately $220,000 today, in critical annual funding from Atlanta University. The HBCU, founded in 1865, had flouted Southern norms by allowing whites and Blacks to share campus facilities, which white politicians did not appreciate.

Later, the school embraced a liberal arts curriculum, bucking the more vocational emphasis white segregationists preferred.

In response, many white philanthropists withdrew their donations.

Despite that challenge, Atlanta University persevered, eventually merging with Clark College. And so it is historically significant that Scott gave Clark Atlanta University $15 million in 2020 to use as it sees fit. The school is using the money for academic innovation, infrastructure and scholarships, and to build up its endowment.

Undercutting Black Medical Schools

In 1908 there were seven Black medical schools in the U.S. By 1921, following a sustained attack on those institutions, only two remained: Meharry Medical College in Nashville and Howard University in Washington, D.C.

The loss of those schools began in 1910, when Andrew Carnegie’s foundation funded a report by educator Abraham Flexner. Part of a larger reform movement to standardize medical training, Flexner’s study recommended the closure of five Black medical schools. It led white funders to sever their support.

At the time, there were extensive problems with medical education across the board in the U.S. There were no standards for curriculum or instruction. But Black medical schools’ particular problems – poor funding, insufficient faculty and inadequate facilities – were exacerbated by Jim Crow segregation and condescension from the establishment.

Flexner’s site visits were incredibly short. He castigated Black doctors as a group without interviewing them. He recommended support for Meharry and Howard to ensure that at least some Black doctors would be able to care for Black patients in segregated hospitals and prevent the spread of disease to the white population.

Carnegie’s and Rockefeller’s foundations were initially reluctant to support the two surviving medical schools in implementing Flexner’s suggested reforms. Their subsequent funding ebbed and flowed irregularly. Scholars have estimated that the Black medical schools closed after Flexner’s damning report would have produced 35,000 Black doctors over the past century.

For decades HBCUs such as Xavier University in Louisiana, which received $20 million from Scott in 2020, have been top producers of Black graduates who become doctors.

A Continuing Problem

A long-term shortage of Black doctors remains a critical public health issue today, reflecting the sustained underfunding of HBCUs.

For example, Maryland’s HBCUs won a settlement against the state in 2021 totaling $577 million intended to remedy decades of underfunding compared with the state’s predominantly white colleges and universities.

Scott funded three of those public institutions: Bowie State, Morgan State and University of Maryland Eastern Shore in 2020.

A review completed in 2021 of Tennessee State University, another HBCU, found the state underfunded it by an estimated $544 million compared with the school’s white counterparts, dating back to 1950.

HBCUs Today

Today there are about 100 HBCUs, half of which are public institutions. They enroll roughly 300,000 students and award nearly 50,000 degrees annually.

Seventy percent of HBCU students are eligible for Pell grants, making the schools critical for first-generation and low-income students. Although they represent only 3% of all degree-granting institutions, HBCUs confer 13% of all bachelor’s degrees earned by Black Americans.

Today, a disproportionate share of HBCU grads become doctors – making these schools a vital on-ramp into the middle class for students of color.

And yet HBCUs are financially fragile. The 10 largest HBCU endowments total $2 billion, just 1% of the $200 billion held collectively by the 10 predominantly white colleges and universities with the largest endowments.

Despite the financial challenges these schools have faced, HBCU graduates include some of America’s most prominent figures, including Martin Luther King Jr., Vice President Kamala Harris, multimedia mogul Oprah Winfrey, Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, filmmaker Spike Lee and Nobel Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison.

There’s no way to know the full toll endured by HBCUs and the Black community as a whole from long-term underfunding and donor hostility. In my view, it will take decades of Scott-style giving for HBCUs to recover what has been lost in time, compound interest and impact over generations.

Activists Want a San Francisco High School Mural Removed, Saying Its Impact Today Should Overshadow the Artist’s Intentions

One of the objectionable panels depicts a dead Native American. Dick Evans, CC BY

By Amna Khalid, Associate Professor of History, Carleton College; Jeffrey Aaron Synder, Associate Professor of Educational Studies, Carleton College. First published on The Conversation.

For nearly a century, a massive mural by painter Victor Arnautoff titled “The Life of Washington” has lined the hallways of San Francisco’s George Washington High School.

It may not be there much longer.

The mural “glorifies slavery, genocide, colonization, manifest destiny, white supremacy [and] oppression.” So said Washington High School’s Reflection and Action Group, an ad-hoc committee formed late last year and made up of Native Americans from the community, students, school employees, local artists and historians.

It identified two panels as especially offensive. One shows Washington pointing westward next to the body of a dead Native American. The other depicts slaves working in the fields of Mount Vernon.

Because the work “traumatizes students and community members,” the group concluded that “the impact of this mural is greater than its intent ever was.” They are campaigning for its removal.

The idea that impact matters more than intention has informed debates about everything from microaggressions to cultural appropriation.

But when it comes to art, should impact matter more than intention?

As historians committed to preserving our cultural heritage – and as citizens invested in the power of art to engage the public – we see the growing chorus of voices favoring impact over intention as a dangerous trend, one that makes art more vulnerable to rejection, censorship or even destruction.

A radical work for its time

For most members of the Washington High School’s Reflection and Action Group, the only message “The Life of Washington” sends is one of crushing, dehumanizing oppression.

What happens, though, when we examine the mural in the context of the life and times of the artist?

Painter Victor Arnautoff was born in 1896 in a small village in present-day Ukraine. He emigrated to San Francisco in 1925, where he joined a leftist art collective. During the Great Depression he was a supporter of workers’ strikes and formally joined the Communist Party in 1937. He was even hauled before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1956 for drawing a “Communist Conspiracy” cartoon that caricatured then-Vice President Nixon.

In “The Life of Washington,” Arnautoff decided to place Native Americans, African Americans and working-class revolutionaries front and center in the four largest panels, relegating Washington to the margins.

The slaves toiling in the Mount Vernon fields highlight a central paradox of America’s history: The nation was founded by men who championed liberty, freedom and equality, and yet owned slaves.

Then there’s the striking image of the fallen Native American. The mural’s detractors say that it dismisses the humanity of indigenous peoples. But why must it necessarily be read as dehumanizing to Native Americans? Could it not instead be seen as throwing into sharp relief the inhumanity of the founding fathers?

According to Arnautoff’s biographer, Robert W. Cherny, the image challenged the fallacy that “westward expansion had been into largely vacant territory waiting for white pioneers to develop its full potential.”

That the mural appears in a school is particularly important in this regard. For decades, the country’s educational institutions perpetuated national myths about American exceptionalism and American history as one long glorious march of forward progress. Up until the 1960s, the standard U.S. history curriculum ignored the country’s dark and terrifying history of racial violence, including enslavement and the slaughter of indigenous peoples. So drawing attention to the horrors inflicted on Native Americans and African Americans would have been a radical statement in 1930s America.

Many of those in favor of scrapping the murals seem to believe that merely depicting past atrocities justifies them. In fact, the Action and Reflection Group concluded that the mural contravened the San Francisco Unified School District’s commitment to “social justice.”

Quite to the contrary. In our view, the “Life of Washington” provides an invaluable opportunity for students to engage in a serious and sustained way with social justice issues. There’s a strong case to be made that Arnautoff is exposing – rather than celebrating – slavery and genocide. Moreover, those arguing for the mural’s removal are overlooking the fact that African Americans are not only portrayed as picking cotton and that Native Americans are not only depicted as victims of genocide. Rather Arnautoff is insisting that African Americans and indigeneous peoples were key historical actors in the making of the United States.

Only the latest controversy

The controversy over this mural is sadly not an isolated exception.

Over the past several years, there have been dozens of cases where plays, poems, books, prints, paintings, sculptures, installations and other creative works have been shut down, canceled, removed or otherwise censored based on snap judgments, social media swarms, ideologically motivated reasoning and obtuse interpretations of the art in question.

In all of these cases, there has been little to no regard for the aspirations, aims and ambitions of the artists themselves. Their intentions have been treated along a spectrum that runs from indifference to contempt.

To be clear, we are not saying that an artist’s intent is all that matters. How people interpret and respond to a work of art is inseparable from its raison d'etre.

But disregarding the intentions of artists would place every significant creative work with a whiff of controversy in jeopardy because of its “problematic” or “offensive” content. In a world where intentionality and context are irrelevant, satire and irony would not only be incomprehensible but forbidden.

Artist Kara Walker’s searing paper cuts depicting the horrific violence of slavery in the United States? Nothing more than a celebration of the white domination of black bodies. The pungent, explosive litany of racial slurs in Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing”? Just a vicious rehearsal of profoundly damaging ethnic stereotypes. Keegan-Michael Key’s brilliant sketch character Luther who serves as Obama’s “anger translator”? Simply a racist caricature of the “angry black man.”

What else becomes vulnerable to censorship?

Calls to censor “offensive” art by committees, petitions or the Twitterverse are especially dangerous. For every case of “righteous” censorship that removes works of art that are allegedly racist, sexist, homophobic and so on, there will be scores more censored on the grounds that they are anti-American or offensive to Christians.

As the American Library Association reports, the most frequently challenged and banned books are those that contain “diverse content” and include characters of color or address themes of sexuality, racism, religion, disability and mental illness.

Four out of the top 11 most challenged or banned books in 2018 were objected to on the basis of their LGBT content. “Two Boys Kissing” – a 2013 novel centered around the lives of seven gay teenagers – has made the American Library Association list for several years running, even though The Guardian described it as a “complex,” “intricate” novel “so extremely powerful [it] leaves you thinking long, long after you have finished reading it.”

Thinking long and hard, alas, is in short supply for members of the “we are not interested in the artist’s intentions” when the art offends us brigade. Ripping art from its context degrades our critical faculties and imprisons us in the present. It smacks of a literal-minded authoritarianism that assumes and indeed insists that a creative work can and must only be read in one way.

When people refuse to see the contradictions, tensions and ambiguities of art, it becomes disposable. Arnautoff’s detractors bring to mind Oscar Wilde’s warning that any time a spectator of art tries to “exercise authority over it and the artist,” he “becomes the avowed enemy of Art and of himself.”

It took Arnautoff almost a year to complete the mural, painstaking labor that could be erased with a single coat of paint. Not only would this outcome whitewash history, it would also deal a severe blow to our own capacity for creativity and critical thought.

Michigan Introduces Bill To Mandate Teaching Slavery As It Existed In American History

In the aftermath of the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va, Democrats in Michigan's House of Representatives are pushing for legislation requiring that African-American history is a mandatory part of the curriculum in all public schools. 

This new legislation sponsored by Democratic Rep. Sherry Gay-Dagnogo, explains The Root, the lead sponsor, is critical due to growing attempts by Republican-led school boards to rewrite the history of slavery in America. 

“We all have to do a better job of getting to know each other and understand each other,” Democratic Rep. Sherry Gay-Dagnogo says. “But it starts in our schools in educating children properly so they’re able to push back when they hear lies pushed forward about different races of people.”

The Texas Board of Education, in particular, has led the way in rewriting the history of slavery in America, changing the verbiage around the presence of Africans on plantations to 'workers' rather than slaves. More than one school board has tried to position the history of slavery as one akin to the temporary migrant workers who harvest food crops in America. 

AOC has written about this Texas Board of Education problem for years, although it's less relevant now in the time of on-demand printing. Previously, Texas school books dominated all text books, with an inability to customize text books for each state, due to economies of scale in book publishing. Now the blue state schools do not use the Texas text books, choosing to present a more honest vision of history. 

In the ongoing fight over the determination of social conservatives to rewrite America's history of separation between church and state, Texas put into the textbooks the assertion that Moses actually influenced the writing of the US Constitution.  

We're dealing today with Trump voters who actually believe that Trump is operating as a soldier for God. 

From Slaves to 'Workers'

In October of 2015, a 15-year-old student in Houston Coby Burren sent an image of a page in a McGraw-Hill Education geography textbook to his mom because it refers to Africans brought to American plantations as 'workers', rather than slaves. 

“It talked about the U.S.A. being a country of immigration, but mentioning the slave trade in terms of immigration was just off,” said Ms. Dean-Burren, who is black. “It’s that nuance of language. This is what erasure looks like," wrote the New York Times. 

“It’s no accident that this happened in Texas,” Kathy Miller, president of the Texas Freedom Network, a group that has criticized the content of state-approved textbooks, responded in October 2015. “We have a textbook adoption process that’s so politicized and so flawed that it’s become almost a punch line for comedians.”