Black Philanthropy Quotes

The power of Black philanthropy must be multiplied for us to secure the fuel to keep fighting.

Recall the confirmation fallacy: governments are great at telling you what they did, but not what they did not do. In fact, they engage in what could be labeled as phony “philanthropy,” the activity of helping people in a visible and sensational way without taking into account the unseen cemetery of invisible consequences. Bastiat inspired libertarians by attacking the usual arguments that showed the benefits of governments. But his ideas can be generalized to apply to both the Right and the Left.

We need to distinguish between two contrasting narratives of Culture Talk. One thinks of premodern peoples as those who are not yet modern, who are either lagging behind or have yet to embark on the road to modernity. The other depicts the premodern as also the antimodern. Whereas the former conception encourages relations based on philanthropy, the latter notion is productive of fear and preemptive police or military action. The difference is clear if we contrast earlier depictions of Africans with contemporary talk about Muslims. During the Cold War, Africans were stigmatized as the prime example of peoples not capable of modernity. With the end of the Cold War, Islam and the Middle East have displaced Africa as the hard premodern core in a rapidly globalizing world. The difference in the contemporary perception of black Africa and Middle Eastern Islam is this: whereas Africa is seen as incapable of modernity, hard-core Islam is seen as not only incapable of but also resistant to modernity. Whereas Africans are said to victimize themselves, hard-core Muslims are said to be prone to taking others along to the world beyond.

The idea of educating the Negroes after the Civil War was largely a prompting of philanthropy. Their white neighbors failed to assume this responsibility. These black people had been liberated as a result of a sectional conflict out of which their former owners had emerged as victims. From this class, then, the freedmen could not expect much sympathy or cooperation in the effort to prepare themselves to figure as citizens of a modern republic.

I choose to believe humans are inherently good. There are countless causes needing tremendous support. There are many people who do good in a vast variety of areas. There are causes both publicly known and not well-known. No one should be angered by a particular cause getting tremendous attention as it may be proof it is timely and in much need of support, and no one should be angered by others choosing causes that are not their own. The question is… Are you contributing in a meaningful and positive way to better the world with your unique gifts?

OSF was also the first major foundation to get behind same-sex marriage. From 2000 to 2005, a pivotal period in the marriage equality fight, OSF invested millions in LGBT rights organizations. This early money, some of which went to back state-level fights, like a 2005 legal challenge in Iowa, was arguably more important than the bigger money that came in from other funders later on. OSF grants also went to frontline activist groups fighting for immigrants and, later, to Black Lives Matter.

Long before Feeney popularized giving while living, the early-twentieth-century philanthropist Julius Rosenwald preached the same gospel—with a remarkably similar slogan, “Give While You Live.” The founder of Sears, Roebuck, Rosenwald’s name is now largely forgotten precisely because he didn’t emulate contemporaries like John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie in creating a permanent foundation. Yet Rosenwald may have had as much impact as either philanthropist because of what he did do, which was to sink a lot of his fortune into helping build 5,300 schools for black children throughout the South. It was the kind of huge up-front capital investment that a more cautious foundation, mindful of preserving its endowment, would never have made. But Rosenwald’s cash and boldness had a transformative effect on African-American chances in the Jim Crow South, where his schools educated the likes of John Lewis, who helped lead the civil rights movement long after Rosenwald was gone.

It was not Paris alone but all revolutionary France. "Servants, peasants, workers, the laborers by day in the fields" all over France filled with a virulent hatred for "the aristocracy of the skin." There were so many moved by the sufferings of the slaves that they had long ceased to drink coffee, thinking of it as drenched with the blood and sweat of men turned into brutes. Noble and generous working people of France and those millions of honest English Non Conformists who listened to their clergymen and gave strength to the English movement for the abolition of slavery! These are the people whom the Sons of Africa and the lovers of humanity will remember with gratitude and affection, not the peroting Liberals in France, nor the "philanthropy plus 5%" hypocrites in the British houses of Parliament.

Now if one notices carefully one will see that between these two worlds, despite much physical contact and daily intermingling, there is almost no community of intellectual life or point of transference where the thoughts and feelings of one race can come into direct contact and sympathy with the thoughts and feelings of the other. Before and directly after the war, when all the best of the Negroes were domestic servants in the best of the white families, there were bonds of intimacy, affection, and sometimes blood relationship, between the races. They lived in the same home, shared in the family life, often attended the same church, and talked and conversed with each other. But the increasing civilization of the Negro since then has naturally meant the development of higher classes: there are increasing numbers of ministers, teachers, physicians, merchants, mechanics, and independent farmers, who by nature and training are the aristocracy and leaders of the blacks. Between them, however, and the best element of the whites, there is little or no intellectual commerce. They go to separate churches, they live in separate sections, they are strictly separated in all public gatherings, they travel separately, and they are beginning to read different papers and books. To most libraries, lectures, concerts, and museums, Negroes are either not admitted at all, or on terms peculiarly galling to the pride of the very classes who might otherwise be attracted. The daily paper chronicles the doings of the black world from afar with no great regard for accuracy; and so on, throughout the category of means for intellectual communication,—schools, conferences, efforts for social betterment, and the like,—it is usually true that the very representatives of the two races, who for mutual benefit and the welfare of the land ought to be in complete understanding and sympathy, are so far strangers that one side thinks all whites are narrow and prejudiced, and the other thinks educated Negroes dangerous and insolent. Moreover, in a land where the tyranny of public opinion and the intolerance of criticism is for obvious historical reasons so strong as in the South, such a situation is extremely difficult to correct. The white man, as well as the Negro, is bound and barred by the color-line, and many a scheme of friendliness and philanthropy, of broad-minded sympathy and generous fellowship between the two has dropped still-born because some busybody has forced the color-question to the front and brought the tremendous force of unwritten law against the innovators. It is hardly necessary for me to add very much in regard to the social contact between the races. Nothing has come to replace that finer sympathy and love between some masters and house servants which the radical and more uncompromising drawing of the color-line in recent years has caused almost completely to disappear. In a world where it means so much to take a man by the hand and sit beside him, to look frankly into his eyes and feel his heart beating with red blood; in a world where a social cigar or a cup of tea together means more than legislative halls and magazine articles and speeches,—one can imagine the consequences of the almost utter absence of such social amenities between estranged races, whose separation extends even to parks and streetcars.