In this interview, Danielle Wiggins, a scholar of race and post-1960s politics and an assistant professor of history at Georgetown University, joins editor Jonny Gordon-Farleigh to explore the historical evolution of the US philanthropic system. They discuss its development from the late nineteenth century, its complex relationship with the state, and its dual role in both enabling self-determination and perpetuating existing power structures in shaping social issues like racial inequality.
JGF: You’re a contributor to a new book – Mastery and Drift – that explores the historical creation of the philanthropic system in the US, the supportive and disciplinary nature of its relationship to the state, and the role of professional-class liberals in the explosion of this model from the 1960s onwards.
As this is quite different from the European experience, can you outline this process as it unfolded in the United States?
We also see a shift to tax-exempt foundations funded by wealthy individuals, which moves from the communitarian ethos of giving to the current ‘wealthy philanthropist’ model. At the same time, you also have somewhat of a shift in the purpose of giving – it becomes less about charity and more about enriching society through the funding of arts and education. Figures like Andrew Carnegie and John Rockefeller embody the ‘Gospel of Wealth’, which argues that the purpose of giving is to enrich and to serve broader humanity.
This period also saw a massive wave of migration from rural to urban areas, which included the migration of African Americans to the South – the Great Migration – at the beginning of the early twentieth century, which then escalated even further after the first World War. This is also what we call the Progressive Era, which saw a new interest in addressing social problems. This new class of reformers – the predecessors to the ‘professional class liberals’ that we talk about in the book – are using both private and state mechanisms to address the new problems that mass immigration and industrialisation are causing.
These reformers partner with philanthropists to address some of these urban problems, mostly in the urban North, but the post-Reconstruction South serves as another site of experimentation for philanthropy, where we see both its potential and its limitations. A good example of this is the formation of Black education in the South, as scholars such as James Anderson have shown us. Black educators and community leaders, who had been organising to build Black schools and to train Black teachers in the aftermath of emancipation and Reconstruction, began to build Black schools in partnership with philanthropic organisations – such as the Carnegie Corporation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and most notably the Rosenwald Fund, created from the wealth of Sears, Roebuck and Co.
And on the one hand, these schools are incredibly important. They serve as sites of self-determination, liberation, and education – serving a radical and transformative function by inspiring a commitment to social change and agitation. They, along with Black churches, are key sites in these communities. On the other hand, these important Black sites of liberation are being funded by corporate dollars. They serve as mechanisms through which wealthy elites sought to curtail Black self-determination, mobility, and political independence, and through which they were also trying to construct and maintain the Jim Crow racial and economic order – which of course necessitated this stratum of exploitable Black labour.
What we see in the early twentieth-century South in particular is that philanthropy in the United States is a tool that's used to perpetuate white supremacy. Eventually that goes global, as historian Maribel Morey explores, looking at the Carnegie Corporation and how they took the logic of modernisation that they were practising in the US South and explored it on a global scale in their efforts to modernise the Global South. She argues that they used this ‘giving power’ to drive colonial power and to solidify the ways in which the wealthy determine how we understand the problem of poverty – as a very individual problem that's based in culture, thus requiring modernisation, improvement, and development. So they're defining the scope of how we talk about poverty, in concert with professional class academics and social workers (who are also being funded by foundations). They're determining the language and the metrics by which poverty and the problems of the poor are defined, measured, and addressed.
What we see is how philanthropy enables local communities to exercise some measure of self-determination. But is it really self-determined? Writing about the history of the NAACP (the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), the political scientist Megan Ming Francis introduces the term “movement capture”. The NAACP began in 1909 as an interracial group focused on addressing lynchings and racial violence. Then they became increasingly funded by an organisation called the Garland Fund, which said, “We'll give you money, but stop talking about lynchings and racial violence, and focus more on something like education”. So we see a shift in the NAACP’s priorities in the 1930s and 1940s to focusing on desegregating schools. And that's what they became known for with the Brown v. Board of Education case in the 1950s. But that means shifting their focus away from legal and extralegal violence in the South. Black education is very important, understood by the Black professional-class liberals as the key to economic upward mobility, but at the same time it necessitated that they shift their attention away from the knottier issue of power and violence in the US South.
The connection to post-colonial histories has been explored recently by Tehila Sasson in The Solidarity Economy: Nonprofits and the Making of Neoliberalism after Empire, looking at market values and how, when Western states couldn’t act in the way that they did before the post-colonial era, in came private philanthropic institutions that were able to deliver similar goals but under the guise of private institutions and more market-driven mechanisms.
From the 1960s, philanthropy has been used in policy incubation, testing out ideas at a small scale, but often in partnership with the state, which will publicly fund these at a larger national mass scale and make them available as ‘public goods’. As philanthropy becomes involved in service delivery, the state retreats, and austerity policies come through, philanthropy is no longer simply incubation and experimentation; it’s more and more responsible for delivery, too.
That's an important point. The United States was what the historian Brian Balogh has described as an ‘associational state’. Rather than an ‘absent’ or ‘weak’ state, it's just a state that's out of view. Beginning in the nineteenth century, the United States governs the federal state by delegating or devolving authority to private sector institutions. Local associations, churches, local business groups (as historian Brent Cebul talks about), voluntary organisations, and corporations were deputised to deliver services on the local level. So the notion that public-private partnerships or devolution is distinct to this post-New Deal era isn’t exactly inaccurate – because there's certainly an escalation and intensification of the private sector being given more discretionary power to decide who gets funded and who does not – but governance in the United States has long been devolved to non-public sectors. Devolution is not something that needs necessarily to be imposed on these communities; it's just a shift in a practice that has already existed. The idea of community and membership as having been lost is also in the United States’ discourse: that we used to be an associational people, part of bowling clubs, rotary clubs, and other local institutions – a ‘nation of joiners’, essentially. Maybe the distinction or the change from, let's say, the 1960s is that fewer people are involved in the democratic decision making of how these resources get distributed. And there are also fewer resources being distributed.
Within this ‘logic’, philanthropy is closely aligned to liberalism’s role in managing the tensions between private property and public good, in that philanthropy is a mechanism for using private wealth to do public good (or at least its own – unmediated – conception of the public good).
While philanthropic foundations are mostly criticised for the source of their wealth and funding decisions, there is much less attention paid to the influence of ‘philanthropic governance’ across civil society and politics.
How do you see the relationship between liberalism and philanthropy, how they're mutually supportive, and how they reinforce one another?
I think one of the key dimensions is US liberalism, particularly as it has developed in its modern iteration from the ‘Age of Reform’ (1910s-1920s), as a technocratic imperative wherein professional elites – trained experts – are trusted to be the best, most efficient, or ‘smartest’. There's this belief that they should determine how resources are developed and distributed, and what the agenda is. This technocratic imperative and focus on expertise has been key to liberalism. We see it in the New Deal and the Great Society. Many of these ‘experts’ are coming from foundations like the Ford Foundation, and someone like McGeorge Bundy goes from Ford to the Kennedy administration. Karen Ferguson, in her book Top Down: The Ford Foundation, Black Power, and the Reinvention of Racial Liberalism, writes about how people who are able to accumulate wealth are considered to be experts on how to amass and distribute resources.
There is an almost anti-democratic impulse in the way that liberalism has expressed itself. If we think about the history of the Democratic Party in the United States, there's a tension between the professional-class liberals and working-class groups and groups of colour. Who gets to control the party – is it the elite, the experts, the policy wonks, or is it the people? – is being worked out in the Democratic Party, but I think also in American liberalism more broadly.
There's also something about the depoliticised nature of that strain of liberalism, whereby politics becomes replaced by non-partisan problem solving – which is very much intuitive to professionals working within the state or in private institutions. This is more about, like you say, caretaking the economy and managing resources, and there's a bias towards a more technocratic, privatised system of delivery than through political competition and the state.
It's almost a feedback loop: policy becomes more technically dense and complicated, because it's created by policy experts, which underscores this claim that we need experts. As the federal bureaucracy grows and the mechanisms of governance become more complicated, that is a depoliticising and de-democratising force as well. As politics becomes the purview of professionals and experts, and many of the local associations in which people would have civically participated decline, the only acceptable way of participating on a mass democratic scale is voting. That becomes the limits of political participation.
Your essay – Survival Pending Corporate Sponsorship: The “Crisis” of the Black Family, Black State Skepticism, and the Evolution of Black Liberalism in the Post–Civil Rights Era – outlines how the Black family becomes a site for private action over public interventions, which is part of a much broader devolution of responsibility for social policy to communities and individuals.
As part of this confluence between state austerity and private philanthropy, can you retrace how this is treated and experienced at the level of the Black family?
I'll begin by saying that the Black family begins as a problem to be addressed by private actors in the Black sphere. Its instability was to be measured and studied by Black social scientists such as W.E.B. Du Bois or E. Franklin Frazier, and to be managed by Black social workers and church leaders. Public interests (i.e., federal interests) and access to public assistance for Black families were largely inaccessible to Black Americans, because to be Black and to be a second-class citizen was to be excluded from these emerging benefits of the welfare state or from the public sector. A lot of the early civil rights agitation is to be included in the benefits of the progressive reforms of the 1910s and 1920s. As the welfare state expands with Roosevelt's New Deal, which begins to provide support for needy families, Black people – as Melinda Cooper suggests in her book, Family Values – essentially continue to be governed by the Poor Laws, this tradition of social welfare in which assistance is only offered to the neediest families. So Black people are fighting to have access to the benefits of this emergent welfare state. At the same time, they recognise the violence of the state and the violence of intrusion of the state into Black family life. When the public sector would intervene in Black family life, in the late nineteenth to early twentieth century, it was through policing: arresting and incarcerating Black men, women, and children and putting them on prison farms and chain gangs, or group homes for children. So this ‘privatism’ and tradition of self-help that develops in the fall of reconstruction is a mechanism of survival and of protection from state violence. State assistance for Black families, unlike what began to exist for needy white families, was generally to control and discipline, to surveil and eventually to incarcerate.
Gradually, through the agitation of Black activists, Black Americans do get access to family assistance benefits. We see the emergence of a pretty robust welfare rights movement in the 1960s. At the same time, the federal government is becoming more interested in the problem of the Black family through the publication of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s report, The Negro Family: The Case For National Action, in which he blames Black urban unrest and economic instability on what he calls the crisis of Black matriarchy, and basically roots Black poverty in Black Americans’ purportedly pathological family structures. This is during the 1960s, the period of the Great Society, the War on Poverty, and the Civil Rights Movement. The federal government begins investing in ‘repairing’ Black families, often through dissolving or deputising nonprofits on the local scale. Private institutions that had been addressing the problem of the Black family are now trying to uplift, reform, and stabilise Black families with access to federal funding. Claire Dunning talks about how local nonprofits and community development corporations are involved in this project of strengthening the Black family.
There's also a big focus on Black male unemployment, mostly coming through public investment in training and job programmes for low-income Black people. This public support recedes with the rise of austerity, blaming inflation on poor Black people and particularly on undeserving women of colour. Reagan is the best example of this, mobilising the caricature of a single Black mother as the ‘welfare queen’ to advance attacks on the welfare state more broadly.
They return to the strategies of community survival that have sustained them, they just do so with more corporate partners.
What I focus on in this chapter is Black people recognising that they're back in the conditions of austerity that they’ve long been accustomed to, because that is what Black life has been – fighting for piecemeal public support. So they return to the strategies of community survival that have sustained them; they just do so with more corporate partners, who are themselves figuring out what corporate social responsibility means: how can we show that we support Black communities at the same time that they're boycotting us because we refuse to apply affirmative action principles? Many of the companies that the Black Urban League or the National Conference of Negro Women are partnering with are being boycotted by other Black organisations. So this focus on family reunions, Black arts programmes, and the funding of Black cultural initiatives is a way of these corporations figuring out how they can maintain the market that they’re trying to develop, while not actually improving the economic conditions of the Black people who both work for them and consume their products.
One important aspect of this historical process is the 'yes, but' approach of Black liberals, which is based on a long – and justified – history of state scepticism and lack of confidence in the government's ability to address inequality. Even where there is clear support for state intervention to address inequalities, you say this is undermined by the 1980s 'turn', where the state withdraws from social policy and the main opportunities for urban renewal and local regeneration are through corporate partnerships.
Can you explain this history of state scepticism (as opposed to anti-statism) and how it became vulnerable to values around self-help, privatisation, and localism?
My broader book project is a history of Black liberalism – Black Excellence: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Black Liberalism – which comes out in September. Atlanta is this site of public-private partnerships and corporate corporatism, since it was burned down and rebuilt after the Civil War. Black people have played a major part in facilitating those corporate partnerships since the 1970s. I describe Black liberalism as a two-pronged project that seeks to reform the ways in which Black people are oppressed to rebuild more equitable and democratic institutions, at the same time as Black liberals are seeking to reform Black people themselves – both so that they can survive while being excluded from the rights and privileges of full citizenship, and so that they can be prepared to participate in these democratic institutions. As well as trying to fix the structures, there was an attempt to ‘fix’ Black people. And this idea of ‘pathology’ persists today.
The phrase ‘hollow prize’ was coined in the 1960s and 70s to reflect the fact that electoral power did not necessarily translate into effective political power.
I use the ‘yes, but’ term to describe what I see as an affective shift that ultimately informs Black policy in the post-1960s. In this period, it seems that the Great Society and a commitment to racial liberalism are rapidly being abandoned and replaced by ‘grievance politics’ mobilised by Nixon and eventually Reagan. The ‘yes, but’ approach describes what I see as a pessimism and apprehension about the future of the race, expressed with a kind of panic about the Black family and Black-on-Black crime.
This is also an era of increasing Black representation in municipal politics. Atlanta has had a Black mayor for over 50 years. When these mayors were elected, there was a lot of hope that they would be able to redistribute resources and power to their Black constituencies, but they were hamstrung in their ability to do that. Black mayors are coming into power at the very time that cities are beginning to decline – the phrase ‘hollow prize’ was coined in the 1960s and 70s to reflect the fact that electoral power did not necessarily translate into effective political power.
In the 1980s, Black liberals recognised the need for massive state intervention – on the scale of a Marshall plan for cities – to address racial and economic inequality. But this wouldn’t happen anytime soon: this was the era of Reaganism, and there was also a resurgence of explicit racism and racial violence, of white nationalist groups, and of the Klan. We see its pinnacle with the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. It is an era of real concern about the survival of the race. And so this ‘yes, but’ approach represents both a rhetorical move and a governance strategy that legitimates a shrinking or narrowing of Black political agenda, even when these Black elected officials are now in the public sector. But they say, ‘Our hands are tied. Let's focus on first self-improvement, improving our communities, improving ourselves as workers and parents and community members, and then doing that with private sector money, because that's all we have access to’.
What I suggest is that the turn in the 1980s – then called ‘conservatism’ and now called ‘neoliberalism’ – was not a new strategy of self-help, but was instead a return to established practices that included working with corporations and foundations, which was a key mechanism of Black community building in the late nineteenth century. ∞
Read other conversations from our Philanthropy, Power, and Systems Change series - with Eli Manderson Evans, CEO of the Blagrave Trust, and with Emma Shaw from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation - on our website or as a subscriber.
Danielle Wiggins is a scholar of race and post-1960s politics and an assistant professor of history at Georgetown University. Her first book, Black Excellence: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Black Liberalism, will be published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in September 2025. Her writing has been published in the Journal of Urban History, the Journal of African American History, Black Perspectives, Atlanta Studies, Slate, and the Washington Post/Time’s “Made By History.”
