Madam C. J. Walker's Gospel of Giving by Tyrone McKinley Freeman

Author:Tyrone McKinley Freeman [Freeman, Tyrone McKinley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780252085352
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2020-09-29T00:00:00+00:00

Gift Categories

Through Ransom’s letter, Madam Walker’s gifts can be categorized as monetary, tangible nonmonetary items, employment, and institution-building. The bulk of the letter focused on the typical category of monetary gifts as philanthropy. Ransom presented twelve of Walker’s monetary gifts. Amounts were not given for two of the gifts, but the remaining ten ranged from $5 to $1,000 and totaled $1,550 for the three-year period. The $1,000 gift was the famous pledge to the local colored YMCA. It was an outlier on the list because five of the gifts were for $50 or less, and four were for either $100 or $200. It was instructive, however, that Ransom led with this gift because it was clear both he and Walker wanted many people to know about it and the significance of not only its amount, but of its source—a black woman who owned a business and used her resources to uplift the race during Jim Crow. Charitable giving met important needs and demonstrated respectability and virtuous womanhood, too.

Walker tended to make the gifts of $50 or less to smaller, local organizations such as Flanner House in Indianapolis, the Star Christmas Fund, the Mite Missionary Society at St. Paul AME Church in St. Louis, and the St. Louis Colored Orphans’ Home. These local organizations were vital to their surrounding communities. Faced with gaps in services created by the discriminatory practices of white mainstream social-service organizations, these black-serving organizations were essential to survival in the black community.6 In 1916 the Indianapolis Freeman reported that Walker had a history of visiting poor families in the city several times per year to “attend to their needs.”7 Her own private visits to families and public gifts to charities represented her efforts to combat poverty. Walker appears to have made several small donations to these organizations over time. Such a pattern likely represented her understanding of the importance of continuous support for vulnerable organizations. A steady stream of smaller gifts better addressed organizations’ long-term cash-flow concerns than did one-time gifts of larger sums that often left organizations scrambling to find replacement donations after their expenditure.

Walker had tended to make the gifts of $100 or more to relatively larger organizations with regional, national, or international programs. For instance, such gifts went to Palmer Memorial Institute, which educated students throughout North Carolina and the South; the “State University” in Louisville, Kentucky; and the International YMCA.8 Her $200 gift to Charlotte Hawkins Brown’s Palmer Memorial Institute covered one teacher’s salary.9 The $100 gift to “State University” was made in honor of Alice Kelly, Walker’s tutor, assistant, and frequent travel companion, who had worked as a teacher in Kentucky, and Lucy Flint, Walker’s bookkeeper.10 The gifts were commensurate with those made by white northern donors and frequently totaled more than what was given in the aggregate by black donors and southern white donors.11 These monetary gifts were the most represented type of gift in the letter, but they were complemented by examples of nonmonetary giving that provided added dimension to Walker’s gospel of giving.

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