In 1967, the Ford Foundation’s annual report included a special message from its president, McGeorge Bundy. Writing in the context of what he termed “the terrible riots of 1967,” Bundy’s essay nevertheless put forth a relentlessly positive argument about the nation’s racial future, despite what he acknowledged were the dire facts of its past and present. Among these, he highlighted America’s long and defining history of institutionalized racial exploitation, the white backlash that had met African Americans’ freedom struggle, and the separatism of black power that marked their abandonment of the nation and its liberal promise of equality. Regardless of...

In 1962, the Ford Foundation’s trustees released Directives and Terms of Reference for the 1960s, an implicit call to action against Henry Heald, the Foundation’s president. Heald’s conservatism and top-down management style had been very attractive to the board just a few years before in the wake of the 1950s Red Scare, but now he seemed stodgy and ill suited for stewardship of Ford’s almost limitless resources and the activist ethos of its founding mission. John F. Kennedy’s election in 1960 emboldened the Foundation trustees and the rest of the postwar liberal establishment to act on their ambitions for the...

When the Ford Foundation’s Fund for the Advancement of Education and the New York Board of Education joined forces in the early 1950s to deal with the “problem” of Puerto Rican migration to the city, their solution was clear. The authors of the study that resulted from their collaboration were confident that the “rapid adjustment of Puerto Rican children and parents to the community and the community to them”¹ would result from a conflict-free integration of these children into racially mixed public schools where they would have access to a wide array of cutting-edge enrichment programs aimed at their acculturation...

In the first months of 1968, the newly elected governing board for the I.S. 201 community-control demonstration district and its recently hired administrator, Charles E. Wilson, sent the Ford Foundation’s Mario Fantini their proposal for the schools in East Harlem, along with a request for the Ford Foundation to fund and otherwise support the plan. The board, which was dominated by activists from East Harlem MEND who had been involved in the schools fight at least since the I.S. 201 controversy, was more than ready, as Wilson put it, for “the forces in favor of community control” to “take the...

On August 14, 1966, the New York Times published a guest editorial by Douglas Turner Ward, the African American playwright, director, and actor who had recently become a darling of the New York theater world. Ward’s breakthrough had come thanks not only to his undisputed talent but also to his race in a period when white audiences and critics were hungry for realistic theatrical expression of the “black experience” as a way to understand African Americans’ claims and actions in the black power era. He capitalized on this moment of white attention and the Times’s bully pulpit to make the...

In January 1979, the Ford Foundation announced that Franklin Thomas would replace the retiring McGeorge Bundy as the president of the Foundation, which was still the nation’s largest and most powerful philanthropy. In making this appointment, the trustees made a monumental gesture that symbolized the culmination of Ford’s long-standing commitment to racial assimilation. Thomas was not only black but also a Foundation protégé, having spent ten years from 1967 to 1977 as the handpicked, founding president of Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation (BSRC), a demonstration by Senator Robert F. Kennedy and the Ford Foundation to institutionalize establishment liberalism’s attack on the...