Carnegie
Corporation
of New York
Spring 2007
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Alan Pifer’s Vision Shapes
an Era of Grantmaking
Brown v. Board of Education signaled that one of the most effective ways to work toward the goal of social justice was to support public interest and minority rights litigation. It was against the backdrop of the events in the early 1960s that Carnegie Corporation of New York embraced philanthropic activism as a way to promote social and racial justice and to help under-represented people gain a voice. This approach was shaped by Alan Pifer, who joined Carnegie Corporation in 1953. Pifer headed the Carnegie Commission on Educational Television, served as acting president of the Corporation beginning in 1965 and as president from 1967 until his retirement in 1982. Under Pifer’s leadership the Carnegie Corporation Task Force on the Disadvantaged, which was composed of five senior staff members, was formed in 1967 and recommended a multi-pronged strategy to address the needs of many groups, including African Americans, Mexican Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, and women and children. At the core of this effort was Pifer’s commitment “to involve the Corporation directly in policy-making and reform campaigns.”1
“Alan Pifer’s experience with African students and African university leaders, both during his [years of administering the Fulbright Program] in London and in running the Corporation’s Commonwealth Program at the time of transition from colonial rule to independence, gave him a different slant on issues of race and self-determination in this country,” says Fritz Mosher, who was a program officer with Carnegie Corporation during the Pifer presidency. “He saw people [in Africa] who were fully capable of taking over and running their institutions and their countries. He and the Corporation supported their right to do that in Africa, sometimes in the face of lingering colonial resistance, and he was quick to apply the same principles and expectations to the rights of African Americans to represent their own interests and control their own destinies here.” Under Pifer’s direction Carnegie Corporation joined with the Ford, New World, Taconic and other foundations in supporting class action litigation by civil rights organizations for access to education and other rights and launched a multifaceted program to train black lawyers in the South for the practice of public interest law and to increase the legal representation of blacks.
“It was a big shift for the Corporation to move from support of academic work in the humanities and social sciences to a much more direct engagement in things that were quite political,” says Mosher.
During Pifer’s tenure, the Corporation funded an array of projects, including those associated with legal rights, legal advocacy and other socially concerned efforts. The work involved significant collaborative undertakings. “None of this pioneering work could have been done by Carnegie Corporation or Ford—or other foundations—if the Johnson Administration’s Justice Department had not been friendly to it,” says Avery Russell, who joined Carnegie Corporation in 1970 and retired in 1999 as director of public affairs and program officer. “It was a true public-private collaboration.”
1 Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, The Politics of Knowledge. The Carnegie Corporation, Philanthropy, and Public Policy, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1989.