113. Celebrating Black Philanthropy (Replay)

Today we’re going to be talking about Black giving, specifically within the United States. 

By design, there exists a huge huge disparity in the level of wealth between various racial groups in the United States. Our economy was built on the forced labor of Africans brought here against their will and when slavery was ended…it feels appropriate to add an asterisk, because legally, when slavery was outlawed in the US, an exception was written into our laws, that incarcerated people would not be freed. And the law remains the same today. As an aside, let me know if you’d be interested in an episode where we focus on our money and the prison industrial complex. I have some book and film recos that I could share. In any case, enslavement for most Americans ended with the 13th amendment and then our government created policies to make sure that white people were boosted in our economy and that Black people were denied basic access to basic opportunities.

And as a result of years and years of policies designed to create this result, we have exactly that result. 

White families have the highest level of median family wealth, more than 7x higher than Black families’ median wealth, that  is a widely accepted fact, and it is according to the (2019) Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances. So the policies have worked exactly the way they were designed. Median wealth for white families is $190,000 and only $24,000 for black families. That is according to the Federal Reserve.

And yet and still.

African Americans donate the most.

I’ll link an article by Hawwa Muhammad in which she writes that:
“African American families have—more than any other racial group—contributed the largest portion of their wealth to charity. According to a report by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, Black households give 25% more of their income annually than white households, and nearly two-thirds of African-American households donate to organizations and causes, totaling $11 billion each year. Despite the racial wealth gap, Black households continue to prioritize giving.” End quote.

To put a finer point on it, black Americans give away more of their money than other Americans. Are you surprised to learn this?

African American giving has been traced back to the year that enslaved Africans were brought to Virginia in 1619. Black mutual aid societies immediately emerged among the enslaved Africans to take care of each other during this crisis. Those giving practices have been traced back to West Africa, where most of the people came from. And the giving included giving of resources such as life saving food and water, to time, to emotional and psychological support.

Modern black philanthropy spans the wide spectrum of socioeconomic groups within the US. It includes black families who are barely making it, and black families who are wealthy. It includes black people who built this country and black people who are recent arrivals.

Before researching for this podcast, the first black philanthropist that I’d read about in America was Madam CJ Walker, she is sometimes described as America’s first self made female millionaire. She made her fortune selling hair products and cosmetics to black women. And she gave away a lot of money to the YMCA, the Tuskegee Institute, Bethel AME Church, Bethun-Cookman University, she was also a patron of the arts. She had a beautiful gathering place built for community leaders of her time. She died at 51 years of age, but she built so much in her short life, and she gave so much. In addition to the donations I already mentioned, she also gave the NAACP the largest donation ever given by an individual, that was to support their fight against lynching in America. And she gave the largest individual donation to preserve Frederick Douglass’ house in Anacostia.

So I had always understood Madam CJ Walker to be the first black philanthropist in America, but in researching this episode, I learned about a black woman who preceeded her, by decades.

Her name was Mary Ellen Pleasant. And wow wow wow. Her history is so complex. She lived for almost 90 years and she is now widely believed to have been the first black self made millionaire. Mary Ellen Pleasant made her money in lots of ways. Although she often posed as a housekeeper, she actually seems to have made the bulk of her wealth through investments. She invested in gold and silver, she loaned her money to banks and as well as to individuals. She also made money by opening several businesses, including boarding houses, laundromats, and apparently brothels. Which feels like such an old timey word. Is that what we’re still calling them? Brothels? In any case, she made her money in lots of ways and she turned right around and gave it away. She was heavily involved in the Underground Railroad. She used her money to provide transportation, housing and jobs to people who were trying to escape slavery. She used her money for legal advocacy to end slavery. She also used her money for women in general to provide housing and clothing to any woman that needed it. Later in her life, she said the “most important and significant act of [her] life” was donating the equivalent of $1M to fund the uprising at Harpers Ferry.

So we’ve talked about the philanthropy of the black community in general in the US, we did a spotlight on two very wealthy philanthropists in particular, Madam CJ Walker and Mary Ellen Pleasant.

If YOU are a black listener, you might be interested in participating in Black Philanthropy Month (BPM), it is observed every August and it was created by Dr. Jackie Bouvier Copeland. I will leave a link to that in the show notes.