Description
Book SynopsisAt first glance, the Ford Foundation and the black power movement would make an unlikely partnership. After the Second World War, the renowned Foundation was the largest philanthropic organization in the United States and was dedicated to projects of liberal reform. Black power ideology, which promoted self-determination over color-blind assimilation, was often characterized as radical and divisive. But Foundation president McGeorge Bundy chose to engage rather than confront black power''s challenge to racial liberalism through an ambitious, long-term strategy to foster the social development of racial minorities. The Ford Foundation not only bankrolled but originated many of the black power era''s hallmark legacies: community control of public schools, ghetto-based economic development initiatives, and race-specific arts and cultural organizations.
In Top Down, Karen Ferguson explores the consequences of this counterintuitive and unequal relationship between the liberal
Trade Review
"Vigorously argued and thoroughly grounded in research from the extensive Ford Foundation archives, this important book carefully traces the roots of the Foundation's 'developmental separatism' as well as the evolving contours of social and political thought within the black public sphere, effectively putting the two forms of separatism in dialogue with one another." * Alice O'Connor, University of California, Santa Barbara *
"Karen Ferguson's Top Down is a provocative and often brilliant history of the single most important philanthropic institution in the long civil rights era. The Ford Foundation and similar philanthropies, she argues compellingly, shaped Black Power and other radical movements of the 1960s and 1970s." * Felicia Kornbluh, University of Vermont *
Table of Contents
Introduction
PART I. SIZING UP THE URBAN CRISIS
Chapter 1. Modernizing Migrants
Chapter 2. The Social Development Solution
PART II. TRANSFORMING THE GHETTO
Chapter 3. Developmental Separatism and Community Control
Chapter 4. Black Power and the End of Community Action
PART III. CULTIVATING LEADERSHIP
Chapter 5. Multiculturalism from Above
Chapter 6. The Best and the Brightest
Epilogue. The Diminishing Expectations of Racial Liberalism
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments
