Philanthropic and Foundation Support for Blacks: A Case Study From the 1960s

Abstract

The 1960 decade was by any measure one of most turbulent periods of social change in recent domestic history of United States. It was a decisive decade in which college trained blacks, rural poor blacks, and urban ghetto blacks united in an effort overcome. Writer William Robert Miller said that perhaps most remarkable unsung achievement of Martin Luther King, Jr., is way he took an ordinary congregation of middle-class blacks-many with college degrees-and made them something more, the backbone of a dangerous and demanding crusade for human dignity1 in Montgomery, Alabama. King, of course, was a college graduate, an alumnus of predominantly black Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, Crozier Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania, and Boston University. He was precisely kind of person W.E.B. Du Bois had in mind when he said race will be saved by extraordinary people, the talented tenth.2 However, King's life moved in a direction that deviated from Du Bois prescription for a collegeeducated black person. King was a leader of thought but not also a missionary of culture, as Du Bois said leader would be. He was a preacher, not a teacher. As a member of talented tenth, King, according to Du Bois formula, should have been not just a teacher, but a teacher of teachers. King rejected teaching as a mission.