White Philanthropy: Carnegie Corporation's an American Dilemma and the Making of a White World Order by Maribel Morey

Author:Maribel Morey [Morey, Maribel]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781469664736
Google: aDcwzgEACAAJ
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2021-09-15T21:38:58+00:00

1. Rockefeller Funding and the Social Sciences on Black Americans

In 1929, the Rockefeller Foundation’s board dissolved the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial (LSRM) and appointed former Harvard economist and dean of business administration at the University of Michigan Edmund E. Day to direct the social sciences program which the foundation inherited from the LSRM. At the same time, former LSRM director Beardsley Ruml was appointed director of the newly formed Spelman Fund and assigned the task of overseeing the funding of any final LSRM projects that the Rockefeller Foundation was not planning to absorb.

Among the many consequences of the Rockefeller organizations’ consolidation between 1929 and 1930, social scientific research on Black Americans, or rather, on “race relations,” dramatically decreased to a halt at the Social Science Research Council. For this network of white foundation officials and social scientists at the time, the study of “race relations” was synonymous with the study of Black Americans. Above all, these white men tended to equate Black Americans—rather than white Americans’ continued insistence on white supremacy and Black subjection—as the central problem and abnormality causing strains between white and Black people. For them, the study of “race relations” and the study of societal ills they associated with Black Americans tended to be one and the same.6

During the consolidation of the Rockefeller organizations in 1930, and again conflating the study of “race relations” and Black Americans, the Rockefeller Foundation’s managers squarely questioned whether they wanted “to include the negro in the social science program.”7 Just before then, LSRM’s outgoing director Beardsley Ruml had reviewed the organization’s field on Black Americans.

In his 1929 memorandum, Ruml reflected on the LSRM under his leadership, writing that the organization had funded social scientific studies of Black Americans along with organizations “working on a national basis for the improvement of the relations between white and colored races.”8 It also had financed Black universities such as Fisk, Howard, and Atlanta Universities “that would be strongly equipped in the social sciences and able to develop professional training in law, business, social work and public administration.”9 From Ruml’s point of view, this multi-faceted approach of funding white and Black scholars’ social scientific studies of Black Americans and “race relations” was playing its part to help white and Black Americans reach a more harmonious state of cohabitation in the United States.

While vocal in its embrace of the social sciences, the LSRM was building upon some precedent in the United States since the late nineteenth century of white philanthropic support for social scientific research on race. W. E. B. Du Bois’s Philadelphia Negro (1899) was, for example, an early example of a white philanthropist supporting social scientific research on Black Americans in the United States.10 This study had been financed by Susan Wharton, a Quaker philanthropist whose family was a principal benefactor at the University of Pennsylvania. Wharton requested in the 1890s an investigation of Black Philadelphians’ living conditions.11

At the time, other Black scholars also published studies on Black Americans, particularly through the American Negro Academy. Founded by leading Black scholars and writers such as William H.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.