Women's History Month: In the Shade of Trees We Did Not Plant

Appeared in Voice. Vision. Value. Black Women Leading Philanthropy 12 March 2021

I, like many others, have previously written about why philanthropy must adopt a justice orientation. A revisiting of this feels critical in this moment as we reach grim milestones in the COVID-19 pandemic, and experience deepening economic, environmental and racial injustice. 

In 2018 as an Atlantic Fellow in Social and Economic Equity at the London School of Economics, I set out to investigate the many contributions of Black women across the global philanthropic sector. I interviewed 25 Black women from seven countries and found Black women funders are in the vanguard of moving philanthropy toward justice and doing so with a great sense of urgency against the slow, if not reluctant, gestures the larger sector has made.  

But, as one of my interviewees, Yvonne Moore of Moore Philanthropy noted, “Black women’s leadership, ‘Black girl magic’, is actually not new. It is new to everyone else but us. Black women have been fixing, have been correcting and have been straightening up for centuries. It’s just that other people have caught up.” 

Darlene Clark Hine is one of few scholars to have studied the historical philanthropic practices of Black women. She studied women like Jane Edna Harris Hunter, Nannie Helen Burroughs, and Mary McLeod Bethune. She concluded that these women were not just funding brick and mortar institutions that provided social services, they were also fighting racist policies and harmful narratives that labeled Black people as inferior, immoral, and by extension, undeserving of equality. For these women, our philanthropic foremothers, philanthropy was an act of resistance in pursuit of justice. Just consider the contributions of Bridget “Biddy” Mason, Annie Turnbo Malone and Oseola McCarty. 

Bridget “Biddy” Mason (1818- 1891), born enslaved, fought for her freedom (and the freedom of thirteen of her family members) and won. Working as a nurse and midwife, and earning only $2.50 a day, Mason saved her money, and over time amassed an estimated $3 million to become the first Black female landowner and real estate investor in California. She used her wealth to feed and shelter the poor, start an elementary school for Black children, and organize the First African Methodist Episcopal Church in Los Angeles.

Annie Turnbo Malone (1869 - 1957) was more than Madam C.J. Walker’s former boss. Malone was a chemist and entrepreneur who is considered the first Black woman millionaire in the United States. She founded Poro College, a cosmetology training school for Black women, provided tuition to two students at every Black land grant college in the country for several years, funded the development of a maternity ward for Black women in a segregated hospital, and in the 1920s gave Howard University Medical School $25,000, its largest financial gift at the time.

Oseola McCarty (1908 - 1999) was a seamstress and washerwoman from Mississippi. She opened a bank account at age eight and had saved $280,000 by the time she retired at 86 when she could no longer work due to crippling arthritis. She donated the bulk of that money, $150,000, to fund scholarships for Black students at the University of Southern Mississippi, a school that had been all-White until 1960. Though her formal education ended in the sixth grade, she received honorary degrees from the University of Southern Mississippi and Harvard and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Bill Clinton. 

And there are so many more. 

All of these women were trailblazers who used their philanthropy and risked the few privileges they had to formalize and legitimize Black ways of living, working, worshipping, and learning. Where government social safety nets excluded Blacks, relegating them to servitude and permanent second-class status, Black women philanthropists stepped up to found organizations to provide services their communities so desperately needed. And yet, we should look at their work not as acts of charity and goodwill, but as radical acts of justice and resistance. 

The 25 Black women I interviewed are following in the steps of their philanthropic foremothers—Mason, Malone, McCarty and others. They are using their philanthropy to dismantle oppressive systems. They are challenging the White supremacist orthodoxies of philanthropy and replacing them with intentionally anti-racist policies to ensure funds get to the organizations and people who will help our communities thrive. They are showing up authentically as themselves, fighting against, and in many cases, outright ignoring workplace respectability standards around dress and speech. Most importantly, they are moving our sector to justice.  

As my interview with Teresa Younger, president and CEO of the Ms. Foundation for Women was nearing its end, I asked her about the weight of Black women’s leadership in philanthropy today. She paused and then offered a most eloquent response: “I know that I stand in the shade of trees that I did not plant, I walk down roads I did not pave and I drink from wells I did not drill. I reap the benefits of those who did that before me and it is my obligation to water those trees, repave those roads and maintain the wells. I hold that sincere. I hold that deeply sincere to who I am.”

As Women’s History Month ends, let us honor the work of Black women philanthropists who planted the trees, paved the roads, and drilled the wells that sustain us, our work and our world. 

Onward.