Finding Philanthropy’s Forgotten Founder

For a poor, Black son of the South like me, beginning life in Jim Crow’s grip, the haughty, heady world of professional philanthropy might as well have been a different planet. When I first landed at the Rockefeller Foundation, I immersed myself in the history of the institution and the field. I read about the captains of industry, famously dubbed “robber barons” by muckrakers at The Atlantic : Andrew Carnegie and Andrew Mellon and John Pierpont Morgan and Henry Ford, whose namesake foundation I’ve been privileged to serve as president for the past 11 years.

The standard line is that modern philanthropy traces its beginnings to 1889, when Carnegie wrote what we know as “The Gospel of Wealth . ” In the face of rampant inequality, Carnegie proposed a bold idea: The wealthy, he argued, should freely give from their gains to aid “the masses”—though not the “unworthy” poor, whom he deemed too lazy and irresponsible to merit support. In fact, Carnegie accepted that inequality was a natural, even inevitable, by-product of capitalism, and so not a condition that philanthropy (itself a “creature of capitalism,” as Henry Ford II later said) bore any responsibility to address.

[ From the May 1929 issue: The principles of public giving ]

But here and there, I heard mentions of another name—Rosenwald—that was not included in the traditional pantheon of philanthropy’s founders, which piqued my curiosity.

I began to explore. I asked the experts. Between meetings, I snuck downstairs to the in-house Rockefeller Foundation library to research.

What I discovered was a radically different approach to philanthropy—and to the capitalism that at once precedes, enables, and necessitates it. In the life and leadership of Julius Rosenwald, our first social-justice philanthropist, I found a perhaps unlikely lodestar—an inspiration for my own work and my own way of working.

I was born in August 1959, to a single mother in a Louisiana charity hospital. My mom, my sister, and I lived together in a small shotgun house—a shack, really—in rural East Texas.

Throughout my childhood, I heard the name Rosenwald. I knew of the Rosenwald Schools, almost 5,000 in number, distributed across the old South. Once, they educated one out of every three Black children in the region, including Thurgood Marshall and John Lewis, Zora Neale Hurston and Maya Angelou. I knew that the schools were synonymous with opportunity, advancement, and excellence.

But the man behind the schools? I hadn’t a clue who he was.

Decades later, after stints in law and finance and running a Harlem nonprofit, I found my own calling in philanthropy—and, as my fate would have it, I landed at one of the best-known philanthropies of them all, the venerable Rockefeller Foundation (established in 1913, around the time that Rosenwald started to build his schools).

And so I set out to rediscover Julius Rosenwald. He was born, I learned, in Springfield, Illinois, in 1862, a few blocks from Abraham Lincoln’s residence. His German Jewish immigrant parents manufactured uniforms for Union officers, and they raised their son in the Reform temple where his father served as president.

Together, they practiced a strand of socially conscious Judaism that emphasized the values of tzedakah , or “righteousness,” and tikkun olam , “repairing the world”—informed by the charge of Deuteronomy: Justice, justice shall you pursue.

After an apprenticeship in Manhattan’s garment district, Rosenwald settled in Chicago. There, he sold men’s suits and eventually, in 1895, invested $75,000 (nearly $3 million today) in a 50 percent ownership stake in one of his distributors—a fledgling business called Sears, Roebuck, and Company. (Notably, he bought out the Roebuck of Sears Roebuck.)

Rosenwald’s managerial and marketing ingenuity spurred the business to prodigious success, as America’s emerging middle class ordered clothing, kitchenware, and almost anything else they could imagine from the first mail-order catalog. One characteristic innovation from the young Rosenwald: printing a thicker catalog on smaller stock, so housewives would place it at the top of their pyramid of magazines in their kitchens or living rooms.

In 1906, Congress authorized, and the Post Office implemented, a new rural delivery service, which ushered in a consumer-goods revolution. No longer were farmers required to trek into town for their mail. Riding the wave, Sears quickly became, in its own words, “the world’s largest store”—the Amazon of its time. And in 1908, Rosenwald became the president of Sears, ultimately amassing one of American history’s great fortunes.

Rosenwald charted a middle course amid the extremes of the Gilded Age, steering between the gathering provocateurs who rejected capitalism on one side and the industrialists who exploited it on the other.

His early-20th-century views don’t align perfectly with my own—he was, for example, anti-union. But in many other ways, Rosenwald was a champion of a more inclusive capitalism—a democratic capitalism—that aspired to strengthen the growing republic by mitigating inequality. His vision is more relevant than ever—more requisite, too—and in it, we can find seeds of our own repair and renewal.

At Sears, Rosenwald offered a pioneering employee-benefits program, including competitive compensation, paid vacation and sick days, and reliable bonuses. Even more remarkably, he experimented with an early version of employee ownership, offering veteran employees the option to purchase company stock, which later evolved into an extensive profit-sharing program.

Rosenwald attributed his success to “opportunity, enterprise, and luck,” not his own guile, guts, or genius. Unlike many of his era, he did not see wealth alone as proof of virtue. And he devoted his life to extending and expanding that opportunity and luck for others—both in making his fortune and in giving it away.

As a philanthropist, Rosenwald gave significantly within his own communities—to Jewish and immigrant causes and Chicago institutions, including Jane Addams’s Hull House, the University of Chicago, and the Museum of Science and Industry. But he directed most of his giving toward ensuring, as he said in 1918, that Black Americans enjoy “an equal chance with the white man to climb as high … as their individual capacity warrants.”

This was an audacious objective, given the state of Black America at the time. And one struggles to imagine John D. Rockefeller or Andrew Carnegie, for instance, even contemplating such a project.

[ Read: Philanthropy serves the status quo ]

Rewind the clock to the eve of the Civil War: In 1860, the United States’ Black population numbered about 4.4 million. By 1900—35 years after slavery’s official demise—that population had doubled. And yet, at the turn of the century, nine out of every 10 African Americans lived in the South, three out of four ensnared in chattel slavery’s brutal successor institution, sharecropping. By custom and law, barely half could read or write. In many places across the South, state and local bodies had banned basic education in Black communities with formal anti-literacy legislation, to say nothing of the informal enforcement via a regime of racial terror.

Against this painful, entrenched injustice, Rosenwald went to work, in close partnership with lifelong friends and colleagues such as Booker T. Washington, the founder of the Tuskegee Institute, who was perhaps his most influential mentor and adviser from 1911 onward. In the segregated South, they collaborated with Black communities to build 4,978 public schools from 1912 to 1937. And as the dream of safety, dignity, and opportunity carried millions of Black Americans to the industrializing North during the Great Migration, Rosenwald, at Washington’s urging, provided for a range of organizations that would help transition the migrants into urban life—including the YMCA, the Urban League, and the NAACP.

Rosenwald’s relative obscurity today reflects an almost willful collective ignorance of Jewish American contributions to our democracy in general—and to progress for African Americans in particular—a pattern of erasure that we would be well served to acknowledge now, as new cleavages emerge between two communities that have been so essential to each other’s liberation.

When I reflect on all of this, I cannot help but wonder about Rosenwald’s prescient sense of the duality—the convergences and divergences—of the Jewish and Black American experiences. Both Jewish and Black Americans were rendered inferior by the codes of American caste. Both suffered—in different ways, to different extents—from racial inequality and violence, from lynchings and pogroms. Both were diaspora communities—and in the North, at least, both were migrant communities, escaping poverty and persecution with little more than the shirt on their back and the hopes in their heart.

Furthermore, Rosenwald discerned that as long as one community was vulnerable, so too was the other. And he held fast to the converse, as well: Integration and opportunity and prosperity for one would beget the same for both.

In turn, I believe, he sensed that interracial, interfaith partnership would benefit not just one group or the other, but our shared American community. Ultimately, we are all the protagonists in a bigger American story—the story of a small circle of mostly white, Protestant, property-owning men in Philadelphia that, generation by generation, continues to grow wider because of the patriotic struggle and sacrifice of the people who were once excluded: Black and brown people, Indigenous people, Jewish people, Muslim people, women, queer people, disabled people.

As remarkable as what Rosenwald did to repair his broken world was how he did it. He invested in what I call the three I’s: individuals, their ideas, and their institutions. For two decades, he handed out open-ended fellowships to Black Americans, including the likes of Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, Marian Anderson, and W. E. B. Du Bois—all told, three generations of important figures in the arts and sciences, both celebrated and unsung. He also invested in research that unlocked insights about how to improve the human condition, including better agricultural practices and breakthroughs in medicine and public health. And he invested in transformational organizations—hospitals and settlement houses and an array of civil-society organizations, whose work improved not just the day-to-day conditions of the dislocated, dispossessed, and disenfranchised, but also their longer-term opportunities for inclusion in the American project.

[ Read: How U.S. philanthropy is inspiring foreigners to give ]

Moreover and more broadly, Rosenwald approached his philanthropy with a set of commitments that powerfully inform my own. He sought, in his words, “permanent rather than palliative measures,” to address the root causes of inequality, not merely its symptoms. He said, “What I want to do is try and cure the things that seem wrong.” He didn’t say ameliorate or alleviate consequences. He said “cure”—and he meant it, even if curing the disease would implicate the people and systems that were engaged in the healing. This, too, was different in kind from the giving of Rockefeller and Carnegie, men who advocated for the “scientific philanthropy” that invested in research and discovery, while accepting racial hierarchies as normative.

Rosenwald almost always invested more than dollars—finding ways to offer a full spectrum of resources and support for the people and organizations he cared about . He also insisted in many instances that his contributions be matched, not only by other philanthropists, but by the communities to which he gave (even if through nonmonetary means), so that those communities were meaningfully invested in each project’s success.

And he listened to and learned from the people closest to the problems he was trying to solve—the people already putting solutions into practice—valuing lived experience as equal to established expertise.

In all of these ways and others, Rosenwald represents a different branch of philanthropy’s phylogenetic tree, part of but also apart from the philosophies of philanthropy’s founders—the people about whom I learned when I started on my own journey through this strange world.

Why was he forgotten? Unlike his fellow titans of industry, Rosenwald was a lifelong skeptic of endowments, as he argued in the pages of this very publication , and he insisted that his heirs spend down the assets he had directed to charity within 25 years of his death. The largest fund he created was dissolved in 1947. Many of his contemporaries dismissed this approach as apostasy. Rosenwald recognized, in a way that his fellow barons could not, that many endowments serve founders and funders, laundering their legacies, more effectively than the people and communities they purport to benefit.

Throughout the 20th century, the field of institutional philanthropy flourished in Carnegie’s mold, not Rosenwald’s. American families—including many of today’s billionaire founders—endowed and expanded an extraordinary array of organizations that delivered 100 years of progress. By and large, their work has been a force for good; their collective impact, meaningful.

At the same time, though, I believe that something about the old narrative arc should make us uneasy. Something about the old gospel should make us uncomfortable.

As I see it, we cannot hide from the central contradiction built into our giving. We are creatures of our economic and social systems’ unequal benefits—and yet, we are charged with addressing their unequal outcomes. And the tension is particularly pronounced in this, our own gilded age—our own era of extremes, and inequalities, and extreme inequalities.

Martin Luther King Jr.—one of relatively few Black leaders in the civil-rights movement’s vanguard who did not attend a Rosenwald School—summed this up perfectly. Six decades ago, he wrote, “Philanthropy is commendable. But it must not cause the philanthropist to overlook the circumstances of economic injustice that make philanthropy necessary.”

[ Read: The importance of criticizing philanthropy ]

In other words, we must reckon with the inequality that makes philanthropy both necessary and possible: economic inequality, social inequality, religious inequality, racial inequality. This was Rosenwald’s project, as it ought to be our collective project today.

Ultimately, Rosenwald’s unique story gives testament to the shared fate that binds us together. His legacy teaches us that although our atomized individual identities matter, our shared identity—our shared American values, our obligations to one another—matters most.

Someone once asked Rosenwald, this modest Jewish clothier from Springfield, why he devoted such a significant portion of his benefaction to Black Americans. He replied simply, “I do not see how America can go ahead if part of its people are left behind.”

Pirkei Avot , a rabbinic text on ethics, affirms that we are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are we free to desist from it. Julius Rosenwald lived this precept to the fullest, embracing the hard work of hope. And this is why Rosenwald—the apotheosis of interracial, interfaith, interdependent solidarity—remains the indispensable philanthropist for our time, the hero hidden in plain sight all along.