Madam C. J. Walker's Gospel of Giving: Black Women's Philanthropy during Jim Crow

"Tyrone is a scholar at the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy in Indiana, which is one of the biggest physical gatherings of philanthropy scholars. That’s why the US dominates, because most universities teach courses on nonprofits and philanthropy. In the UK that’s a very recent development, in the last 20 years or so and, in other parts of the world, it’s barely begun. Tyrone makes a crucial contribution by pointing out: “One cannot study the history of African Americans without encountering their philanthropy; it is unfortunate one can study the history of philanthropy without encountering African Americans.” It’s such a brilliant and obviously true sentence. What he does in this book is give you one really detailed case study. I really like detail and I admire historians and he really tells us about Madam C. J. Walker. Now, some readers might know about Madam C. J. Walker from the Netflix series, Self Made, starring Octavia Spencer. That was very much about her wealth accumulation . It’s a fascinating life story. She made her money in cosmetics and was the first female Black millionaire. She’s an incredible character. What Tyrone does is tell you about her wealth distribution , or how her philanthropy and her activism permeated her life. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . She was born Sarah Breedlove, the first freeborn child of enslaved people. She came from a world of need, and it links to Bheki’s book: it’s this horizontal philanthropy, she knew what she was giving to. She’s not Bill Gates giving to countries far away (which I still think is a good thing), but it’s giving within your own experience, which actually is the more common form of philanthropy. In the UK, every year Cancer Research UK is the top cause because everyone knows someone who’s had cancer. People primarily give to what they know, philanthropy is personal. Tyrone’s book reminds us of that because that’s Madam C. J. Walker’s kind of giving. She supports all kinds of different causes, whether it’s schools for African American children, or paying the legal defence of African Americans who are wrongly charged with murder or serious crimes. She pays off the last $500 of the mortgage on Cedar Hill, the house of Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist and statesman, so it could stay in the family and become a memorial. She got to burn the mortgage papers at a public meeting. Great PR stunt! Going back to the spectrum between giving publicly/giving anonymously, Madam C. J. Walker was very much at the public end. Like Bill Gates in McGoey’s telling, there was no such thing as a ‘free gift’ to her. She’s saying,’ Look, this is what I’ve done.’ I think that we can—and should—interpret that as role modelling, encouraging her employees to give, and encouraging fellow African Americans to claim their ability to make change. As Tyrone writes in the book, her kind of works and activism provide “important ways of seeing black women as agents who staked claims for their own humanity and citizenship in the face of seemingly impossible odds.” She promotes, and illustrates, the idea of impoverished Black women as powerful agents, through philanthropy, rather than passive victims or beneficiaries. She packed a lot into those 51 years, though. The other thing to mention here is that philanthropists don’t have to be saints wearing sackcloths and ashes. She clearly was a real spendthrift—she enjoyed fancy cars and throwing parties. At the end of the book, it talks about her attempt to leave a big legacy, but she couldn’t do that because she had spent so much in her lifetime. Her story helps flesh out another struggle that recurs in criticisms of philanthropy—the idea that if you give money away it’s incompatible to also want and have nice things for yourself. If you’re trying to help save lives in Africa, why would you spend anything on a nice house or throw big parties? Or, in our own lives, we think, ‘every time I buy a coffee, or have another avocado sourdough toast, that money could have paid for an anti-malaria net.’ We should all think about the value of money—not just big donors. There really isn’t anyone who only gives and spends nothing on themselves. If the critics of the Bill and Melinda Gates or Mark Zuckerberg-type philanthropy read more broadly, they would see that these tensions are universal. You could pick any big donor and knock them for their lifestyle choices. I think that would be unfair because it would be overlooking the good that they’ve also done, both directly through their giving, but also through their role modelling. The role modelling for Madam C.J. Walker was trying to make sure her employees and her neighbors thought about giving. For Bill and Melinda Gates, it was setting up the Giving Pledge . It’s not just that they’ve done their giving, but they’re trying to encourage other fellow billionaires to give. That, again, takes us to the ‘how do you do that without then also getting the reputational uplift?’ They’re unavoidable, these tensions. Yes, the practice and personal education required for philanthropy is time-consuming. Big donors may have made a lot of money in the for-profit period of their life but that doesn’t mean they know anything about global health, or how to run a museum, or whatever their chosen cause might be. Critics seem unaware that many donors work hard to educate themselves. The idea of the ‘armchair philanthropist’ carelessly writing big checks to causes he knows nothing about, is not how it happens. Not everybody gives up their first job and becomes a full-time philanthropist like Bill Gates did, but many of them do educate themselves and develop ‘domain expertise’. Having picked a cause to focus on, donors tend to want to learn about it, to meet experts, go into the labs, visit these countries. Critical observers seem unaware of that side of what philanthropists do, the personal investment of their time and passion in their causes, it’s not just cheque-writing. Donors have to be open to challenge and to collaboration. They know they can’t achieve anything significant without working with other donors, with government bodies, and with the people delivering the work on the ground. Donors are always a partner with do-ers. This idea that philanthropy is just big money being waved around by tax-dodging egotists is so far removed from the reality of the daily grind of building partnerships and collaborations and slowly making things happen, and sometimes taking steps backwards. It’s not just about the money, it takes a lot of time and personal investment to make any significant change happen. I do think the critiques land better in some places than in others. I’ve certainly had people say to me: ‘Why on earth do you think that philanthropy needs defending? Of course it’s a good thing!’ And I say: ‘Great, I’m so happy that you feel that way, and long may that last in your part of the world.’ But unfortunately, critical ideas spread easily, even when they don’t really hold water beyond their original context. What’s frustrating is most critiques are about very specifical American issues, like the role of money in politics, or university admissions. When people in the UK repeat those criticisms I remind them that we’ve got pretty strong laws in the UK about what you can and can’t donate to, and robust regulation and policies on what benefits donors can get. Another classic US concern that gets extrapolated across the world is when philanthropy has to step in to compensate for low levels of public spending on essential services such as health and education. It isn’t a failure of philanthropy that the US has no equivalent of the National Health Service, or that public schools in that country are funded through local taxes which results in exacerbating inequality. These are instances of government failure, not philanthropic failure. We use the same word, philanthropy, whether we’re talking about private giving in Australia, San Francisco or London, and yet donations are treated very differently, legally and fiscally. Tax breaks are often assumed to be the same everywhere, but there are many countries where they’re minimal, or there are no tax breaks at all. So to say that all donors are motivated by their hope of a tax break simply can’t be true. Even in the UK, a lot of the tax break goes to the charity, not the donor. It’s only higher and additional-rate taxpayers that receive tax relief, and often the relief is factored into their gift. If they want their chosen charity to receive £1 million, they give £800k. But they are still £800,000 “down” on the deal! The role of charity tax reliefs is not as simple as people imagine, that’s really the basic message of my book. It is all a lot more complicated and nuanced than critics make out. Every country provides different things, via the state or via businesses. Philanthropy can fill in the gaps—the ‘failures’ of governments and markets—but it also does so much more: complementing and co-operating with government action, adding the ‘icing on the cake’ that elected bodies would never fund. The precise role that philanthropy plays changes across countries and, of course, it also changes over time. You wouldn’t now need philanthropic water pumps in village squares. But historically, at one point, you did need those. Now water is provided through different means. But, to my mind, if we think ‘gosh, that playground should have been funded by the government’ it seems odd to blame the donor for paying for it rather than blame the government for not providing it. I think the blame is being laid in the wrong places. It is often government failure. That doesn’t mean there isn’t some philanthropic failure in how it’s done. Perhaps the donor wouldn’t listen to what kind of playground the kids wanted, or it was put in the wrong place, or they wanted inappropriate naming recognition. Of course, philanthropy can be done badly. But the very fact of there being a need for a playground in the area that no one else is providing is not the donor’s fault. Much of the scholarly criticism of philanthropy seems to be laying the blame in the wrong place. Often the philanthropic motivation is exactly what you describe: frustration, even anger, with how things are. Some critics worry that encouraging philanthropy will lead inevitably to ‘plutocracy’—the rule of the wealthy, rather than democratic rule—but I’ve never met a donor who actually wants to take over funding and delivering government functions. They want good things to happen and, if need be, they’re willing to pay for a feasibility study to get it going. They have no wish to become glorified public servants or to run a railway. That’s not the goal because, in any case, they can’t afford to do it forever—committing every descendant of theirs to run this train line, or whatever it might be. They just want to inject some capital now to deal with bottlenecks, like a feasibility study for a new train line. Again, there’s a debate about whether that’s fair, because someone else might have a better idea, but not have the resources to put behind it. That’s a legitimate question. But the fear that’s being stoked by critics, that we’re going to live in a plutocracy, is utterly overblown. It sounds like a criticism made by someone who’s never met a donor. They’re angry they have to pay because they want a good train service and need to take action to make it happen. When Bill Gates started his philanthropic work he made a speech in which he pointed out that the amount of money that’s spent on developing solutions to baldness far outstrips the amount of money being spent on all kinds of quite simple, preventable illnesses killing kids under the age of five in Africa. That’s just wrong and we need to tackle it. Philanthropists like the Gateses are making a profound moral statement—that every life is equal, and that preventing avoidable deaths should be a global priority—which I think we need to take seriously. If they say that’s their motivation, who are we to say it’s not? Who are we to say it was actually about some other, more dubious motivation? “There’s a difference between good and useful critique, and just rubbishing people and derogating socially useful acts” When I think of my own reasons for making a donation—like sponsoring a friend running a marathon or putting coins in a tin and then wearing a charity sticker—how pure is my motivation? Did I care solely about the cause with no consideration at all for my friendship, or my reputation? When my students get involved in volunteering, is it purely selfless, or do they also have an eye on building up their CV? We all have mixed motives that we can’t always fully understand and explain. To those who think that only those giving large donations have problematic motives, I’d say that just as we’re all philanthropic, we all also have problematic motivations. As an academic, I can’t argue with the value of good critique. But there’s a difference between good and useful critique, and just rubbishing people and derogating socially useful acts. We’ve got to try to differentiate. We’ve got longstanding problems with donor motivation, with philanthropic impact, with the implications it has for possible systemic change. In some cases, we have to accept there is a tension, or that something is irresolvable. These are good debates to have. But we can’t get lost in these debates and forget that people are hungry right now, climate change is happening right now, a town needs a new museum or a theatre, many good causes need funding now to continue their work. We need to separate out abstract debates from the pragmatic reality of where we are at any given time, which does actually take us to the fifth book."