Thus, two decades after Frederick Keppel’s visit to South Africa, the Carnegie Corporation-funded Poor White Study had proven to be one catalyst for the construction of the apartheid government. Dr. Keppel’s postscripted nod to the dire circumstances of black South Africans notwithstanding, The Poor White Study created a questionable legacy that Carnegie Corporation would in future years seek, with considerable success, to alter.

Facing Apartheid

In the years following World War II, Carnegie Corporation did not undertake or support any projects in South Africa that matched the scope and impact of the Poor White Study. Still, it continued some work there: from 1948 to 1969, for example, through its Travel Grants program, over three hundred South African businessmen, artists, lecturers, journalists and humanities specialists visited the United States—until the 1970s, the vast majority of them white.

In the decade of the 1960s, while African nations across the continent achieved independence from colonial rule, apartheid became more and more entrenched, even as the policy isolated South Africa from the international community.

Apartheid had become a complex, intricate network of laws that prevented blacks from living in certain areas without special permission. It banished blacks to barren, inhospitable Bantustans (often referred to as “homelands”—impoverished territories set aside under apartheid for black South Africans and slated for independence; in 1994 these areas were reabsorbed into South Africa) to eke out a living. It meant the separation of husbands from wives and children unable to legally reside in the same areas. It represented a separate and vastly unequal set of opportunities for blacks and whites. And its hallmark was wrenching poverty that imprisoned millions of blacks who were the majority of the country’s population.

Against this backdrop, Corporation president Alan Pifer, who served as Carnegie Corporation president from 1967-1982, observed that during this period, “We saw little organized activity that the foundation could support. Given the fact that there were so many other opportunities to assist blacks directly in Tropical Africa, the South Africa program did not look like a good use of our resources.” Pifer had a long and signifi cant history with the Corporation and its Africa programs, having worked for nearly twenty years with the foundation’s Commonwealth Program, as it was then known, which funded higher education institutional and faculty development on the continent.

Pifer was driven by a deep commitment to social justice and racial equality, continuing and intensifying the Corporation’s support for efforts to eradicate the historical results of racism in America and in Africa. In the mid-seventies, Pifer reinstituted Corporation involvement in South Africa after a long period of hiatus. Avery Russell, who joined the Corporation in 1970 and eventually served the foundation during her 30-year career as both director of publications and as a program officer, and who worked closely with Pifer on many of his speeches and articles says, “Alan very clearly led the staff on issues of equality and social change. He invested Carnegie Corporation with the living spirit of social justice. And he believed very much in fi guring out how to use the law in South Africa to fight the apartheid system. Everybody believed South Africa would have to change. We just didn’t know when.”

In 1973, when Alan Pifer returned to South Africa for the first time in over a decade to attend a meeting of the United States-South Africa Leader Exchange Program, he met members of a small, educated, professional class of black South Africans who were the nucleus of a black leadership group. These doctors, entrepreneurs and professionals had acquired education and training in their fields within the separate and unequal system of apartheid education. They were highly motivated, talented and were among the best and brightest members of the native population. Clearly, these were the future leaders of a non-racialist South Africa and Pifer wanted the Corporation to work with them to facilitate peaceful change.

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