Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 4, No. 4 | African American Philanthropy, page 2

Of Social Networking
and Net Worth
The setting was casual yet elegant: a summer dinner party in upscale Sag Harbor, on the shores of New York’s Long Island Sound. Japanese lanterns lit the garden and threw soft highlights on a pair of handsome Vietnamese vases while jazz played in the background and hot food beckoned from the buffet table. Many of the guests that evening were African Americans of achievement who knew one another from Manhattan. Eager to trade the hustle and bustle of the city for a weekend in the Hamptons, the partygoers seemed intent on relaxing and enjoying themselves.

I was among the partygoers. As I stood talking to friends, I heard someone ask, “Are you coming to my benefit?” The speaker was Reggie Van Lee, senior vice president in the New York office of Booz Allen Hamilton, and he was referring to the Evidence Dance Company, which holds two benefits—one in Bridgehampton and the other in New York City—each year. The next event, which was to be held in a week’s time, would feature a special program: a fusion of ballet, contemporary and African dance performed by Evidence’s eight-member dance troupe. Van Lee confided his hope that the benefit performance would raise $250,000 to $300,000—nearly quadruple the $80,000 the benefit had netted five years previously. He was expecting 400 benefit-goers, up from 75 just four years ago.

“In truth,” Van Lee told me, “I use every opportunity I get to plug my favorite cause.”

He wasn’t alone. Earlier that evening, I had heard Charlynn Goins reminding guests that her New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation theater benefit would be held later in the fall. Starring Sarah Jones, who took home a Tony for her one-woman Bridge and Tunnel show, the benefit had an ambitious fundraising goal of $300,000. Sponsors aimed to get there by charging $100 to $125 for the performance only, and a lofty $600 for cocktails, dinner, and the show. To anyone expressing interest in the event, Goins handed an envelope containing more details.

“I’m no fundraiser,” Goins told me, laughing. “I’m chairing this benefit because I couldn’t get anybody else to do it.”

Her words were an apt précis of what I was about to discover in the course of investigating the dynamics—and mechanics—of African-American philanthropy (or any other type of
giving, for that matter): Whether you’re trying to get people to donate their money or their time, persuading them to step up to the plate can be a difficult task indeed.

During a weekend that summer in which cultural events competed with political fundraisers for African American support, I also visited the East Hampton home of well-connected Carl and Barbaralee Diamonstein, who were raising money for Congressman Charles B. Rangel (D-Harlem) and his political action committee. Still several months in the future was the Democratic groundswell that would sweep the Democrats back into power in Congress and hand Representative Rangel the reins of the House Ways and Means Committee, making him the most powerful African American on the national political scene. Even so, I was surprised at the sparse African American turnout at the fundraiser—and disappointed by the low percentage of black attendees who actually broke out their checkbooks.

I had come to the Hamptons as the weekend guest of Loida Nicolas Lewis, widow of Reginald Lewis, the financial guru whose nearly $1 billion leveraged buyout of TLC Beatrice had galvanized Wall Street in 1987. Not long after that coup, Lewis was being hailed as the wealthiest black man in America. It was a wealth tempered by generosity: among the many educational efforts Reginald Lewis undertook during his lifetime was to provide a $3 million endowment to the Harvard Law School, which named its international law center after him.

When a brain tumor felled Lewis prematurely at age 50, American finance and philanthropy lost a role model for African Americans all across the socioeconomic spectrum. The torch then passed to Philippine-born Loida Nicolas Lewis, who had married Reginald Lewis in 1968. It was time for Mrs. Lewis to make her own mark in the field.

Determined to keep her husband’s memory alive, Loida and her two daughters, Leslie Lewis Sword and Christina S. N. Lewis, pledged $5 million to the Museum of Maryland African American History and Culture in Baltimore, where Reginald Lewis had been born; it was renamed the Reginald F. Lewis Museum. The $5 million in private seed money donated by the Reginald F. Lewis Foundation ultimately helped to leverage $30 million in public funds from the state of Maryland. Indeed, since its doors opened in 2005, the museum has become a signature destination for city visitors—and an archetype of African American philanthropy.

“My husband taught me how to give,” Loida Lewis told me in the magnificent Fifth Avenue apartment she once shared with Reginald Lewis. There wasn’t much money in the early years of their marriage, Lewis recalled, but even then her husband insisted on sending Harvard an annual check for $10. As the Lewises prospered, those contributions—not only to Harvard, but to other institutions as well—steadily grew.

Today, Loida Lewis continues on as a philanthropist in her own right. One fundraiser she attended, a gala to benefit the Studio Museum in Harlem, brought out what Lewis dubs the “crème de la crème” of African American society. Thanks largely (but hardly exclusively) to the patronage of America’s black corporate elite—among them, American Express chairman and chief executive officer Kenneth Chennault; former chairman of the board and chief executive officer of Merrill Lynch, E. Stanley O’Neal; and Richard Parsons, chairman of the board and former CEO of Time-Warner—the benefit raised more than $1.5 million in the course of a single evening. “Wow, it broke a record!” she said, her pride and sense of achievement shining through. “That kind of thing is going to happen more and more,” she told me, noting that the audience was more than 90 percent African American.

From Citrus Grove
to Capital Management
In Baltimore, I met another African-American philanthropist, investor Eddie C. Brown, and his wife, Sylvia. My visit to the elegant row house that holds the offices of Brown Capital Management told a tale of understated financial success. Peering out through one window, I caught a glimpse of the ultramodern Brown Center, the beneficiary of a $6 million contribution the Browns made to the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in 2003. The college contributed the remaining $14 million in costs.

“We don’t believe in buildings so much as in education,” Sylvia Brown told me with a shy smile. “I think I would have preferred for that gift to remain anonymous.” On the other hand, there is pride in the fact that this stellar building—a new city landmark—stands as a reminder to all city residents, minority children among them, of just how much a black man can achieve.

The source of that symbolism is Eddie Brown, a modest man who began his career as a portfolio manager and vice president at T. Rowe Price Associates in 1973. Nine years later, he launched his eponymous investment company. Today, Brown handles investments with a minimum entry of $20 million—all this accomplished by a man born to an unwed mother 66 years ago, then raised by his grandparents in a Florida farmhouse with no hot water or plumbing. Although Brown helped his grandfather pick oranges and grapefruits on the farm, his grandmother correctly sensed that better days lay ahead for her sharp young grandson. On a trip to Orlando, she pointed out to young Eddie every man she saw wearing a suit and tie. Education, she told him, was the ticket that would take him from the citrus groves to an office job.

The Browns’ business success has enabled them to establish a considerable art collection, with a primary focus on African American artists. In 2002, for example, they gave a partial gift of Henry Ossawa Tanner’s Bishop Benjamin Tanner to the Baltimore Museum of Art. In Brown’s office hangs another Tanner, The Three Wise Men, alongside an arresting sculpture by Edmonia Lewis, Rebecca at the Well, Edward Bannister’s Woodland Interior and Jacob Lawrence’s Genesis Series.

Oprah and Others
An African American donor particularly distinguished by both her wealth and her generosity is Oprah Winfrey, the television host who once famously opined that “The benefit of making money is to give it away.” When Winfrey traveled to South Africa in 2002 to deliver gifts to 50,000 children, she wound up adopting 10 children, ages 7 to 17, who had no parents or family. She placed them in private boarding schools and told readers she had hired caretakers to look after them.

Then she went to visit them—unannounced.

As Oprah related the scene in the December 2006 edition of her namesake magazine, she was shocked by what she saw of their newly adopted lifestyles: “When I sat them down in the living room for a conversation, everyone’s cell phone kept going off—the latest ‘razr’ model that costs about $500. That inner spark I was used to seeing in their eyes was gone, replaced by their delight in rooms full of things.”

Immediately, Oprah said, she realized she had given them too much. And she had not helped to instill the proper values to help them appreciate those gifts. “What I now know for sure,” she revealed in the pages of her magazine, “is that a gift isn’t a gift unless it has meaning. Just giving things to people, especially children, creates the expectation of more things.”

That disappointment didn’t prevent Winfrey from traveling to South Africa in January 2007 to open the $40 million Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls in the hamlet of Henley-on-Klip, south of Johannesburg. The school received 3,500 applications for the 152 spaces available, but will eventually make room for 450 girls. Later in the year, Winfrey was reportedly devastated by the news that a dorm matron at the school had been arrested for abusing some of the students. Winfrey flew to South Africa to meet with school officials and parents, and many praised her for directly confronting the problem. Writing in the Lexington Herald-Leader, columnist Merlene Davis said, “The good coming out of this…is that those girls, who all have come from extreme poverty, have some idea of what a powerful woman looks like and what she stands for. So do those who no longer work at the academy.”

Another prominent African American donor is music impresario and entrepreneur Russell Simmons, who has contributed more than $10 million to various charities. He tells family and friends that he hopes his tombstone will say, “Here lies a philanthropist.” Yet another noted figure in the African American community, Tiger Woods, receives countless requests to donate his golf earnings to worthy causes, but he has opted to focus on building a learning center in California and another in Washington, D.C. where young people will find tools to further their education.

Next page: On September 26, 2007, the Smithsonian Institution, partnering with IBM, announced the opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Smithsonian’s 19th and newest museum.

Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5