Entrepreneurial Appetite

Exploring Black Philanthropy: The Legacy of Madam C.J. Walker with Professor Tyrone McKinley Freeman

• Tyrone McKinley Freeman • Season 4 • Episode 30

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Ever wondered how the business strategies and philanthropic efforts of Madam C.J. Walker shaped the course of Black history and continue to influence present day philanthropy? We are thrilled to have Professor Tyrone McKinley Freeman, a luminary in philanthropic studies, join us in a conversation brimming with compelling insights on Black philanthropy.

Tyrone takes us on an inspirational journey, charting his path from his roots in a Black Baptist church to his pivotal role as an associate professor and director of undergraduate programs at Indiana University's Lilly Family School of Philanthropy. Be prepared to discover how this past informs his work today and his perspective on the power of philanthropy. Our talk further explores the fascinating philanthropic journey of Madam C.J. Walker, her unwavering commitment to her community, and how her unique approach to giving diverged from mainstream models of white philanthropy. 

The latter part of our conversation unravels the dynamic role of millennials and Gen Z in today's philanthropy scene, the power of everyday giving, and the monumental legacy of Madam Walker's philanthropic efforts. Tyrone also shares valuable insights into the work of the Young Black and Giving Back Institute and its role in fostering Black giving, as well as the impact of Black Philanthropy Month on our future. So, tune in to this enriching episode as we delve deep into the heart of Black philanthropy and the enduring legacy of Madam C.J. Walker.

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Speaker 1:

What's good everyone. I'm Langston Clark, founder and organizer of Entrepreneurial Appetite, a series of events dedicated to building community, promoting intellectualism and supporting black businesses. Today we have Tyrone McKinley Freeman, an associate professor of philanthropic studies and director of undergraduate programs at Indiana University's Lilly Family School of Philanthropy. He is also the author of the book we're going to be discussing today, madame CJ Walker's Gospel of Giving Black Women's Philanthropy during Jim Crow. Tyrone, I thank you for being here, really interested in hearing more about your work working in the School of Philanthropy and also the story of this book. But before we do that, I would just ask you to tell us your story. How did you become an associate professor of philanthropic studies? I'm an academic, I didn't know philanthropic studies existed, and so how did you find yourself in the position that you're in right now?

Speaker 2:

Yeah well, thank you for introduction, langston I, for the invitation to be here. Appreciate it, and hello to your listeners. I started this journey as a professional fundraiser, and so I'm a graduate of a historically black college, Lincoln University of Pennsylvania, and I left Lincoln and went to graduate school out in Midwest, and it was during my graduate program that I was introduced to the world of professional fundraising. And so, for your audience, you're thinking about all the different nonprofit organizations out there that are doing work in the community. It doesn't matter if it's education or health or social services or the environment, would have you they. One of the ways that they generate revenue is by asking people for money, and there's different ways to do that, and so I was exposed to that as a career, and my first job out of graduate school was for an organization where they asked me to write grant proposal for them that they could submit to philanthropic foundations and foundations, if folks aren't familiar our organizations that are dedicated to giving away money and they fund an important part of the nonprofit sector, and so that was my entry into it. I kind of, just kind of happened into it from a professional standpoint and just eventually there's more to raising money than simply writing grant. There are ways of you know. You probably have received letters in the mail from nonprofit organizations asking you to give solicitations through social media, using crowdfunding and other things, events, major gifts. So I began to learn that there's a whole field associated with this. There's a very large profession. There's professional association and their great career path that pay very well and allow you to do good. Right, I had to engage the community, so that was my formal entry into it.

Speaker 2:

But the real story kind of goes back to my upbringing, because I'm the son, grandson, nephew and cousin of Black Baptist creatures and First Ladies. So I grew up in the Black Church, which is a premier philanthropic institution to our community, surrounded by that kind of generosity, so really coming out of that tradition and seeing the adults around me constantly engage. And then I was in organizations. I went to the local Y, I was a Boy Scout and all these different things that are nonprofit organizations that are doing things in the community. So I was always a part of it.

Speaker 2:

But it was later, after graduate school, I realized there was a career, a whole field associated with this and that was my entry. And so years later, after having worked as a fundraiser for four or five different organizations in different sectors and getting a lot of experience. I began aging fundraising through an organization called the Fundraising School, which is part of the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, where I'm a professor now. The fundraising school is a leading trainer of professional fundraisers and actually when I first got out of graduate school all those years ago, that organization the first organization I went I worked for set me to the fundraising school to learn some techniques. So, fast forward, several years later, I became the Associate Director of that program and began writing curriculum and teaching fundraisers around the country and overseas, in places like Singapore and South Africa. So that's really my grounding in the field.

Speaker 2:

And then, along the way, I went back to school and earned my PhD in philanthropic studies, which you can get from the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, and completed that in 2014. And then began my faculty journey, and so I was an assistant professor and directed the undergraduate programs. And then I earned tenure and promotion, which is a form of advancement within the university. And then just last month, I was appointed the Glenn Family Chair in Philanthropy, which is a new level for doing research in this field. So that's been my journey to this place.

Speaker 2:

It is a great field. I hope your listeners will look into it because, again, it's a great way to have impact, to get connected with organizations and missions that mean something and that are addressing real important social issues, and that you get to be someone who's not necessarily on the front line in terms of being like a clinician who might deliver therapy or a doctor who might be getting medical, but as a fundraiser, you're part of the light and blood of the organization and you're working to generate the resources so that the doctors can heal and the teachers can teach and the social workers can advise and counsel and take care of people. So it's a great field with lots of potential and lots of opportunity, especially for people of color.

Speaker 1:

So I want to talk a little bit about your work in a Lilly School of Philanthropy. And so you have this endowed chair that you mentioned and, for the audience who doesn't know, when you're a faculty member tenure track, faculty member getting an endowed chair is like the top. It's like the top faculty position that you can have. And so, in your role in the Lilly School of Philanthropy, talk a little bit more about what you do there in terms of like your teaching, your research and your service and how it relates to you personally as a philanthropist.

Speaker 2:

Sure Well. So the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy is the only school of philanthropy in the United States. There's one in China that is kind of our sister school and they started following our model. So this is a leading edge institution and if you think about you know most colleges have a school of business. They might have a school of government or school of public policy, where we come out of a long tradition that believe that there should be space in the university to study the nonprofit sector and to study philanthropy, because they are just that important as government and the private sector, and so we started out as a center on philanthropy in the 1980s and 2012,.

Speaker 2:

Enough momentum and reputation and resources were there for us to morph and to become a full school that offers a bachelor's, master's and PhD degree program in philanthropic studies, and you can use these degrees to enter into the nonprofit sector through fundraising positions, positions at foundations, positions running nonprofit organizations, whether a program manager or an executive director or CEO and again, engaging these important organizations that are doing work. And we also have students who go into the corporate sector, because there's many businesses that will have a corporate philanthropy department or community relations or something where they're trying to connect with their customers and deal with social issues that might affect their operations, and so it's a big, open field. And so, as a professor at this school, I've been helping and working with my wonderful colleagues to develop the degree programs for 10 years. I ran the bachelor's degree in philanthropic studies, so it's been wonderful at launching and engaging young people into the sector over the past decade and I've developed curriculum design courses, taught courses on fundraising, on the history of philanthropy, on overviews of the nonprofit sector, and I also have taught the capstone course, which is the lab course that students will take before they graduate, supervising internships and just working with my colleague to develop robust programs. That again will help. Whether you're an undergraduate student or you're someone who's already out in the field, you want to come back for a master's degree and more recently we just lost a second professional doctorate for people who've been working in the nonprofit sector for a much longer time and are at the executive level already, but they too want to come back, but they're kind of past the master's level but they'd like to do something more data driven and more research driven, but they can take back to their organizations and really invest in developing pain. So we have a robust set of programs.

Speaker 2:

So as a faculty member there, I've been privileged to help stand up this school with my colleagues and make it available. And we also have many different centers and institutes that are doing research, that are connected to important topics. So we have the Maze Institute on Diverse Philanthropy, which again focuses on philanthropy as a color and regularly produces reports. We have the Women's Philanthropy Institute, which looks at the role of gender in philanthropy and how women think about making gifts and giving their time and how that's different based upon their gender and what that means for the sector. We have an institute called the Lake Institute on Faith and Giving, which looks at the role of religion. We have the Muslim Philanthropy Institute, because philanthropy is not just a Christian phenomenon, it's a universal phenomenon, right. So Islam has an important tradition related to charity that this institute looks at and how it affects me even today. So we're operating in many different arenas and again, I'm excited to be a part of that faculty there and I do research on philanthropy and community of color and I'm a historian of philanthropy and so I look at where we've been and how it has evolved, and one of the big issues that I've tackled is if you look at the way the history of philanthropy has been written and has been told, we've been left out.

Speaker 2:

African-americans have been presented in that history as the recipients of white philanthropy, gifts and investments by white people outside of our community, but have rarely been studied or valued or respected as givers themselves.

Speaker 2:

And so that was one of the impetus for doing this book Because, again, coming out of the Black Church, coming out of a black community surrounded by Black generosity, I knew it existed and yet the field was saying that it did right.

Speaker 2:

So I couldn't let that stand. So I wanted to do a project that would lead to these omissions and this neglect and that would raise up this longstanding condition of Black generosity that not only goes back down through the generations, back through into the periods of slavery, but even goes back before the middle passage. It has roots in pre-colonial Western Africa and sensual Africa, where the ancestors came from, who were brought here, so that there are conditions of giving and caring and caring that are cross cultures. It doesn't belong the length of it does not belong to the wealthiest one percent, unlike the way it is possibly portrayed in media. It's something that belongs to all of us, and all of us have and can contribute to it in one way or another as we are able, and that's why Madam Walker's story became healing to me, as I could use her as a way to address these issues, these questions and omissions, but also raise up this powerful, important tradition of black giving, because we wouldn't still be here if we weren't givers.

Speaker 1:

And since you brought up the book, Madam CJ Walker's Gospel of Giving, give us the origin story of the book.

Speaker 2:

Well, I kind of tend to have a little bit of it. So I grew up in a similar with this tradition and raised in the tradition I used to say black generosity produced me because of the people around me and the communities that nurtured me and invested in me. But then to go into these professional spaces and places of philanthropy which are predominantly white, right, when they can't see it or didn't understand it, don't have a vocabulary for it. So there was a lot of cognitive dissonance for me because I'd be sitting in classes or reading this literature and these research or hearing the conversations and black people and other people of color are left out of them or not taking seriously in it, and I just knew that that wasn't factual and that wasn't what was actually happening. So, as I was working on my PhD, I wanted to do something about black philanthropy. I just wasn't initially sure what that would be and I had grown up hearing about Madam CJ Walker. I should say that I grew up in New Jersey but then came out to the Midwest for graduate school and Indianapolis, where I've been living for several years now, was one of Madam Walker's homes and this is where she set up the headquarters for her company and in fact the building that her company still stands in downtown Indianapolis today as the Madam Walker Legacy Center, and her papers are also in the Indiana Historical Society Archive, which is downtown Indianapolis, not too far from the theater. So as a young doc student needing a project, trying to think about what I might be able to do, I kind of lacked on the Madam Walker and for me everybody knows about this idea that she became this millionaire and that she started this beauty company and was a pioneer in black women's hair dressing and beauty culture and cosmetic. But then they also say that she gave money to charity. But that would be kind of the end of it, right, there seemed to be more interest in the millionaire and the business.

Speaker 2:

I said, well, I want to know more about this charity thing. What would she actually doing and who was she giving to and what was she giving and why and where did this come from? So I started to investigate that and the more I got drawn into it, the more I could not only see that it wasn't just this cute side thing that she did occasionally, it was something that was a central part of her identity and it was something that was very important to her, something that she was very serious about and something that reflected the broader culture, history and community of black people that produced her, and so that became the focus and I said, ok, let me tell Madam Walker's story of philanthropy, and in the process I saw how I could then use that to tell the largest story of black generosity in America, because Madam Walker provides I youth her have to provide this window into again this 400-year-old tradition of giving India, america's black people that she is a part of, and so that's really the origin of it. Right, trying to kind of wrestle with this lack of engagement in the professional spaces and also trying to give voice and words and writing through this history that I knew existed, but kind of everywhere I was turning it would kind of tell me a bit. So, as I wrote this book, to kind of speak to that and to address that.

Speaker 2:

The other thing I should say is that, along the way, I really wrote this book for the community. I wrote it for the everyday giver. I didn't write it for academics though I'm addressing some of these questions and omissions that come from the research literature but it was very important to me that this book not just sit on the shelf and only be in libraries that might occasionally get kicked out with. That It'd be something accessible that could be out in the community and that people could use, whether they were fundraisers or where they were members of giving circles or sororities and fraternities or neighborhood associations, wherever they were. I wanted them to.

Speaker 2:

I certainly wanted black reader to see themselves in this history and maybe even you might recognize your mother or your grandmother or your grandfather in what Mountain Walker was doing. I know I certainly did. And then for other readers I wanted them also to get a deeper appreciation for the traditions of black giving and I also wanted them to connect to this idea that philanthropy is more universal, that everybody gives. So that's really the origin and what I helped to do and why I wrote the book and why it's kind of organized the way it is by gift, for the people to kind of see the history behind these types of giving, what Madame Walker did with it specifically, and then bringing that forward to show how those those things that she was doing and that the community was doing 100 years ago are still alive and well in the 21st century. So they may be more finger shifting at technology and other other developments allow.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I want to make a point based upon something you said before I get into this next question, because I think it's going to be a good segue. You talked about how the traditionally black folks are viewed as the receiver, philanthropy, and not the giver, and I think about I don't know if you've heard of this book called the pedagogy of the oppressed, which is written by Paula Frade, frade right, and in there Frade talks about how children, the oppressed it can be children, it can be the oppressed, it can be the learner, whoever is not an empty vessel for folks to just dump information to and so I think of it like that same sort of idea applies in philanthropy, black communities and other communities.

Speaker 1:

Aren't these empty communities where you just put stuff into them as if they don't have anything to give? And I think that was embodied in a lot of what I read in the early parts of the chapter and throughout the book about what it meant to be a black woman and a philanthropist, and Madame CJ Walker's time. So just talk a little bit about that. What did it mean to be a black woman but also be a philanthropist? You know this is post reconstruction, this is the Nadir period of the United States, and so I think that's important contact for people who are going to read this book and listeners of this podcast to understand.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so. So, madame Walker, I should say that. So she was born in 1867, right, so the two years after the Civil War and black people are free from from slavery, right, but it would have during the reconstruction period, and then she died in 1919. So just kind of just after World War One. So she she's spanning this important period where we take freedom for the first time as a collective whole, but then it's taken away from us after 12 years.

Speaker 2:

The white Southerners didn't like black freedom and they wanted their country back, and so reconstruction was ended and now black people were no longer, you know, able to exercise the freedom they were, they were doing, and things like the black code and other started coming that eventually lead us to the Jim Crow segregation. And so she's in the middle of all this, from the lightings and the rise of the Kukka planet, other hate group. She's in the middle of all these things. Born and dealt the Louisiana, she's on a cotton plantation and her parents were enslaved and her sibling girl was laid, but she was born free. So that's the beginning of her story, the end of her story when she's on her deathbed in 1919, 51 years old, about the time of 52, you know this very wealthy black woman and, by the way, her deathbed is in this 34 room mansion in New York, which still stands to this day right that she had kind of deep the eyes and had built this empire that allowed her to invest in her community. And so what did it mean for her to be a philanthropist? Well, during this time frame, this particular time period, there was this idea of white people being race men and race women, and it was very common for for for African Americans to think of themselves as what, particularly middle class reformers and others, and what they meant by that is that I am someone who is dedicated to uplifting my race and to fighting racism and sexism and doing what I can to to bring down Jim Crow and bring about freedom. And so Madeline Walker thought about herself as a race woman. And the interesting thing about race men and race women is that they're operating everywhere. They're in their own businesses, they're in churches, they're in clubs, they're in fraternal organizations, they're in women's clubs and orphanages and old folks homes, and it's everywhere, and they're doing what they can to try to develop services or initiatives that are going to help the people and also advocating for public policy changes to bring about justice.

Speaker 2:

So the interesting thing about Madeline Walker's philanthropy is that it didn't start when she was near death in her elder years, after she had made it and was in kind of the big house that she built, and then decide to become wealthy, which is the leading model of white philanthropy during this era. Religious will know names like Andrew Carnegie, gandhi, rockefeller, cornelius Vanderbilt they're all known for this model of spending your life accumulating wealth in your business Right and then later in your elder years start giving that away. Madame Walker didn't do that and this was an important thing that I found in doing the research on her, because sometimes she's kind of presented as this wealthy person who is giving money away like wealthy people do. But what I learned is that he actually started engaging and giving and helping others when she was in her 20s and she was this poor, orphan, widowed, struggling young mother trying to make ends, meet herself Right. But she finds herself a part of a black community in St Louis that helps her as this young mother and helps her get established and she in turn becomes a giver and she starts helping neighbors and helping other black folks that are coming to St Louis and trying to search for new opportunities. And that's where she reports that she learns that it's her responsibility to help the poor, to help the race, to fight Jim Crow and to do what she can with what she has right now Right. And so that is a different origin story for philanthropy than we're used to hearing Even today.

Speaker 2:

With the Silicon Valley billionaires they kind of the sense that they make. They make it very, they come into this large wealth and then they start setting up foundations or LLCs or other things to start giving and addressing. But no, madame Walker was doing it much early, very, very early on, and it becomes something that grows with her over time, so that as she acquires more resources she gives more resources. And so it struck me as a very accessible model that was very different, again, than what we typically raise up and celebrate in philanthropy. But it felt more familiar to me because, again, like I say, I saw my mother, my aunts, my sister, my grandmothers in Madame Walker's story and it struck me as something that all of us can do and all of us can reach for. Very few of us will become Silicon Valley billionaires, right, but all of us can give from where we are right now with what we have, because there's always someone that can benefit by by our wisdom, by our mentoring, by our time, by other talents we might have, by our pocketbook right.

Speaker 2:

And that's really the model that has allowed us to survive and fight against slavery, fight against Jim Crow and fight against the issues that are still pressing today.

Speaker 2:

Madam Walker and her peers were pooling, whether it was pennies or dollars, or were volunteering on committees or being in fraternities and sororities.

Speaker 2:

They were throwing everything they had at Jim Crow, trying to bring it down. So it's instructed to us as we continue to fight against the residuals of Jim Crow and the new manifestations of these things today, as they rear their head in the 21st century, because our ancestors showed us how they fought this, and it's instructed for us in this moment. So it really is about the everyday giver, madam Walker's story, even though she becomes this millionaire. It's really about these community-based traditions of giving and sharing and the practices that really sustain black communities during Jim Crow, in spite of the hostility, in spite of the violence, in spite of everything that was going on. It's how we stood up our own schools, our own churches, our own fraternities, our own social service agencies when the rest of society was neglecting us to try to figure this thing out. So yes, we had allies at different points, but somehow the story always focused on the allies and not what we were doing.

Speaker 1:

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Speaker 2:

Well, make no mistake about it, we built our own.

Speaker 2:

We built and funded our own organizations, communities coast to coast, right to meet the needs that we saw or that we saw a need for in our community. And that tradition continues today with a lot of black-led nonprofit organizations and certainly the social movement for proteins. That got renewed attention in the aftermath of the killings of our dear brother the 50th, by Trayvon Martin and Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, and that continued to this day. So this is a long standing tradition and I wanted people to read it to come away from the book with a sense that, oh, we're not new to this, we're true to this. We've been doing this from day one and what we're seeing now is just the latest manifestation of what Madam Walker and her peers were doing 100 years ago, and even she was at that time was just the latest manifestation of what black folks 100 years before we're doing. So it's important to recognize that continuum and to see ourselves a part of it and carry that history with us as we fight these new struggles today.

Speaker 1:

So it's interesting this podcast episode is going to be a part of a series that I'm focusing in on Black Philanthropy Month, which is August, but Black Business Month is also in August, and so I think there's some intentionality behind that. I haven't interviewed the founder of Black Philanthropy Month to get her insights on that, but I think there's some alignment there, and so I want you to talk about what it means to do good business as philanthropy, because you mentioned how Madam CJ Walker was a race woman and, as I read the book and as you explained in the book, a lot of just the way she did business was a form of philanthropy. In that we should probably start taking an expansive view of what it means to be a philanthropist, not just as someone who is giving money, but she created a platform for women to have, you know, economic liberation, so could you speak to that?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so one of the things I do in the book. So, I said before, there's five main chapters in the book and each one is made for a different kind of gift, but only one chapter is about money, right, and so this is playing around with definitions of philanthropy and trying to challenge the reader to think beyond money. Money is important. Organizations need money, people need money, communities need money, right, but there's more that community need to thrive to. And so in the chapter titled opportunity, I lay out how Madam Walker wasn't just in business for the sake of being in business. She was very articulate about the fact that her business served a higher purpose. That, yes, it was going to make money but it was going to do good for the race right. That it was going to fight Jim Crow. It was going to provide opportunity for black people in a Jim Crow society that either wasn't checking for them or kept them locked into menial, low wage labor with little opportunity for progress, promotion or gainful employment. And so it's important to know her origin of her first job was as a washer woman, so she knew what those menial jobs were like, because she used to wash white families clothes, right, as did many black women across America during this time frame right, and she knew the struggle associated with that and so she wanted something better for herself, better for her people. And so the imagination and the creativity and the courage imagine this to go forward with this idea and to start this company where that you could become a Madam Walker agent and you could start selling on her haircare and beauty cosmetic product door to door. You could become a traveling eight sale agent on her behalf where she would send you out to different states to try to get contracts with pharmacies and supermarkets to hold the products. You can hang up the shingle in your living room and start doing hair out of your house. I know my grandmother her hairdresser was in a home back in Philadelphia in the 1980s. She would get her hair done in a woman basement right. It is same tradition of setting up a black businesses in the neighborhood, in the community. She also had this opportunity where she would incubate a salon for you, where she would give you money to renovate a storefront or set up shops somewhere outside of your home and help you get started. She was very much about economic empowerment for black women and she wanted to help black women become financially independent so they could help take care of their families, pay for mortgages for their families, send their kids to school, address their needs, in spite of Jim Crow's plan for them, which is only to be domestic workers. I argue that this is a form of philanthropy in this context, because she's bucking the system and she's being very intentional about how she's structuring the company in order to facilitate these different pathways.

Speaker 2:

She states out directly, in fact, her attorney and general managers, a black man named Shreemun B Ransom. He said in an interview about her after she passed away that the Walker Company was really a race company, growing from this idea of a race man and a race woman. It was the original fooboo, I like to say for us by us, that it was going to lift us up, it was going to make money and it was going to invest. It would provide opportunity for people who could then go out and do things in the community too. And here's the full loop on that. Madeline Walker went a step further and she said to her agent okay, now that you're employed and you might be running your own salon or building your own book of business or what have you, it's not enough for you to be selling these products, you have to be doing something for the race.

Speaker 2:

So she started organizing Walker Club around 1916, where she went around and to different cities and towns that she would call together her agents and organize them into clubs and say, through these Walker Clubs, I want you to kind of get to know each other, I want you to support each other and I want you to kind of make sure the business is going well. But I want you to do charity, I want you to engage, I want you to fight Jim Crow. And as I went through the archives, there are lots of reports from the club reporting back to Madeline Walker that they were donating money to the NAACP, that they were donating furniture to black colleges, that they were participating in protest marches against lynching and other things. So they took that they were race women right and so it's kind of this full circle thing, so that she's not only helping people become financially sustainable for themselves and their families but also connecting that back to the ongoing struggle for freedom. And all of this is within the context of her business. Unlike Carnegie and others, she didn't set up a separate foundation like Carnegie did. She did everything through her business once she started it.

Speaker 2:

So, again, it speaks to this model of how black entrepreneurs in particular have thought about their businesses as platforms for the community, a platform for the struggle, because she was not alone. There's a nice literature on the history of black businesses which outlines this thinking and this way of being amongst black entrepreneurs, where, again, so many of them were thinking, okay, yeah, I'm gonna make this money. Well, how can I use that to fund activism or to support organizations or to bring down this Jim Crow thing? So, again, situating her within that tradition was important too. I wanted to bring that narrative forward so that also the black entrepreneurs of the day, just like the black givers of the day, can find some roots and some grounding in that, too, as they think about how they wanna set up, whether they're doing public benefit corporations or LLCs or whatever they're doing that your business can have multiple purposes and it doesn't necessarily have to be in the consulate, as it often talked about or suspected today when we think about corporations and giving.

Speaker 1:

You brought up Freeman Ransom, yes, and I wanna be careful for the audience not to have you all think that I'm steering the conversation away from black women or madam CJ Walker's contributions, because that's really what this conversation focuses on, but I think it's interesting to point out the relationship between Freeman Ransom and madam CJ Walker, because there's all of these, I just call it. It's pop culture ignorance where, like you, have black women and black men pitted against each other on whatever reality show or whatever personality there is, with a podcast on YouTube and things like that, and I just wonder, like, can you just give us a description of what their family like but business like relationship, was in how they work towards a greater mission, without all this ignorant drama that we see on TV and social media between black men and black women?

Speaker 2:

Yeah. So madam Walker was a very astute business woman and she knew her own limit and deficits and she wasn't ashamed or afraid to say it. And so she surrounded herself by people who she knew had the knowledge, the skills, the information that would be helpful to her. And then there's someone again who was denied an formal education by them pro right. And yet every morning well, according to interview we have, when it's from her employee she would come in and she would read the paper or she would circle words that she didn't know and ask the nearest employee can you spell that out for me or tell me what that is right? So she's always someone who's wanting to grow, and she surrounded herself with smart people to compliment her and to support the vision. And so Freeman B Ransom was one of those people. He was a black man born in Mississippi in the 1880s and he actually studied law at Columbia University in New York, and so he was in Indianapolis and she met him early on and when she came to the city and he helped her put the paperwork in place to get the company going, and he becomes this ongoing advisor for her and later he becomes a general manager and he runs the company for several years after her daughter guys, who inherits the company from her. But he's very much a clear partner for her and it's very interesting. You can go into the Manning Walker archives and trace their relationship through their correspondence.

Speaker 2:

Because Manning Walker the company was based here in Indianapolis and Freeman B Ransom his family, was here. So he was running the daily shop on her behalf while she was out on the road building the brand, selling the products, doing demonstrations, going to meetings and those kinds of things. But everywhere she went she would always stop and write him a letter, give him an update, tell him what's going on, and they would actually make decisions and things through the mail so you can trace the development. You see what a kind of confidence he was. You see this kind of loving and supportive nature relationship that develops between them. He saw it very highly of her. He valued and respected her. He was frustrated by her spending habits and he had some laughs about that with her daughter because he wanted to support her financial goals and so he had periods where he was worried that she was getting too far ahead of herself but he was trying to make the kinds of investments and things that would help her have the kind of future that she really wanted, and she also relied upon him for his counsel, but she wasn't afraid to make the decision. Now she would tell him why are this person fire this person? What's going on with the supply chain? We gotta figure these things out.

Speaker 2:

So there's very much this, this very close relationship between the two of them that is very critical and powerful for making the company successful and sustainable.

Speaker 2:

And they become his advisor. He helps her with her giving, he administers many of the gifts that will become important for her later on, and also he becomes one who protects her legacy, because he helps her to write her last will and testament where she's disposing of these assets that she generated over her lifetime. So their family become very close. Her children are on his children almost like God's children to her, and you can see them asking questions of each other about their family in these letters and other things. And the beautiful thing, too, is that that relationship continues to this day, because Madame Walker's heirs and families grew up and lived in Indianapolis, and so does Freeman B Ransom's heirs and families. And so right now, to this day, madame Walker's great-great granddaughter, alelia Bundles, and Freeman B Ransom's grandchild, judith Ransom or the best of friends. They grew up right here together in Central Indiana, and so that legacy, that love, continues and is very powerful and important.

Speaker 1:

So I appreciate you sharing that. I want to. I want to fast forward through some chapters. Okay, and I want to read the title of the epilogue, madame CJ Walker, and African American Philanthropy in the 21st century. And then that in the epilogue you talk about the Smithsonian Museum for African American History in Washington DC and how Oprah Oprah is really a major focus of this part in the work that she does in South Africa, the thing that she's done with Morehouse.

Speaker 1:

You mentioned Robert Smith and Oprah. It seemed like they had a little competition about who's going to be the who's going to donate the most. You didn't explicitly state that, but when Oprah came back and donated one million more, I feel like she was trying to flex a little bit. But anyways, my question is I think there were a lot of. There were some boomers mentioned. I think Oprah's a boomer. I think Robert Smith might be older, jen, jen X, right.

Speaker 1:

My question is how do you see millennials, maybe older Gen Z or maybe even just Gen Z in general, right, because people can start philanthropy at a very young age. How do you see my generation and younger evolving as philanthropists? And there's an interesting point one of my friends made. Who's collaborating with me on this, our mini series on Black Philanthropists. He said that, basically, a majority of millennials view themselves as philanthropists and that boomers they give the most in terms of the overall amount of money because they have the money, but in terms of the percentage of people who give that, that it's millennials who are the highest percentage of givers, based upon the individuals right. And so how do you see us younger, the emergent Black generation, how do you see us as philanthropists moving forward? What's the future of Black Philanthropy? Basically is what I'm asking you.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, well, thanks for that, because I was looking for a way to bring Madam Walker's story forward, and so that's where I led on, initially to Oprah Winfrey and then to the Smithsonian, because I wanted to get at what does that mean for us today? And you're right, what I try to do there at the end of the book is really show people how. You know, I argue it's a mistake to think of Ms Winfrey as kind of this Black Carnegie or this, you know, this Black version of what white folks do when it comes to giving. But that P2 represents these deeper threads and conditions of Black giving. That, madam Walker, because they've been in thought, I'll show you some of that and how that plays out in this one treat on a biography. But the other point I wanted to make about that was that you know, just as Madam Walker shows us, that philanthropy is not about the wealthy elite, not even the Black wealthy elite. Right? I didn't want us to stop our conversation about Black philanthropy today with Oprah Winfrey and Robert F Smith. That crowd is of them, as we are, for who they are and how they use their resources to help them to struggle for freedom. I wanted to be able to say, yes, that is happening, but the everyday giving in the community is just as important. So what your grandmother and your mother do, what your father and your siblings or whoever, what you do every day is very important.

Speaker 2:

And so the Smithsonian campaign to build the National Museum of African American History and Culture became the perfect way to tell that story, because $300 million was raised to help build that building and operate it. Black folks showed up and showed out and gave it all those levels and, yes, the billionaires gave. But I hone in by interviewing the fundraisers from the campaign and I found out about, you know, the 80-year-old Black woman who gave $20,000, the eight-year-old Black boy who gave $2 because they wanted to be a part of this, not the hundreds of people who came forward to be volunteer docents, to give their time, because they knew that this building and this experience was going to be powerful and they wanted to be a part of that right, so that this generosity is everywhere, and millennials were a part of that. The fundraisers for that campaign spent a significant time cultivating young Black professionals and really challenging them and involving them to think about artifacts they might donate, to be in the museum, to think about volunteering to be docents but also to think about making gifts, particularly at the $5,000 or above level. And so they actually developed this giving level to $5,000 to $25,000, specifically for the group you're talking about, and spent time working with them and developing their capacity to give, because they wanted to support and raise up this important building to tell our history for the world.

Speaker 2:

And so I say all that to say that, yes, this tradition is alive and well and that millennials, black millennials, have picked it up and are running with it and, of course, social media and other forms of technology are helping to facilitate that for them now and in the way that they communicate and relate to each other, communicating with each other about needs, about social movements, about issues and mobilizing people to action. And I'll just point out an organization founded by a Black millennial that very much facilitates Black giving, by the Young Black and Giving Back Institute, based out of Washington DC, that their whole modus operandi is engaging Black millennials in philanthropy and helping them develop their financial portfolios, their board service portfolios, their engagement, and right now, for Black Philanthropy Month, they're running the 828 campaign, the August 28 campaign, where they have identified a series of Black-led nonprofit organizations around the country that need funding and they're raising up their platform to build their profile and encouraging people to support these Black organizations and encouraging Black millennials to do it. They also do a whole range of training and conferences on Black philanthropy for millennials. So, yes, I've seen this generation take it and try to put their own spin on it, even as it comes from these deeper historical trends and threads that connect, and again to show their appreciation for history.

Speaker 2:

The reason why I called the 828 campaign and the reason why Black Philanthropy Month is in August is because 828 is such a powerful day in our history. It's the day that Emmett Till was killed, it's the day of the march on Washington, so it invoked some very powerful and important moments in our history that stirred us to action. And the founder, my friend and colleague, dr Jack Jacqueline Bovier, who founded Black Philanthropy Copeland, likes to say that if February, as Black History Month, is about our past, then August, as Black Philanthropy Month, is about our future. Yeah, right, and how are we mobilizing resources and raising up and continuing to fight the good fight and leverage even more resources for our community on behalf of these struggles for justice? Absolutely.

Speaker 1:

That was a great ending. Ooh, that was a really good way to tie that up, because you taught me something there. Because I'm in recording all these episodes, I'm wondering why did it start? Why is it in August? And it makes perfect sense. Now. Our last question for today, as we have origins as a book club, I'm encouraging my listeners to read your book, madam CJ Walker's Gospel of Giving Black Women's Philanthropy during Jim Crow, and I want to ask you what books are you currently reading, or books have you read that have inspired your journey to do the work that you do and to become who you are?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, no, thank you for that. To be a good writer, you have to be a good reader, I think, and to see what can be done with language. So I try to expose myself to good writing as much as possible in the hope of trying to make mine better, and so I recently finished a book by Daniel Blaner called the Coming, and Daniel Black is actually a professor at Clark Atlanta University, at an East BCU writer in Georgia, but he's a novelist and he's written several novels that are just powerful. He has a beautiful grasp of language and he weaves our history into the fictional stories that are so powerful.

Speaker 2:

And the book the Coming is actually about the middle passage and it has a collective narrator. So it's really telling our experience of the Coming over, of being brought over on the slave ships and what that was like. On the one hand it doesn't sound like something you want to read, but the way that he does it is so powerful, is so poetic that you see the dignity and the humanity of our ancestors, in spite of the terror and the horror and the pestilence that they were dealing with. And so somehow he manages to capture the humanity, even though he also recounts the horror that we endured. So it's actually in the end of the triumphant novel that I really enjoyed reading. And then I just started, I have to say, cosby's book Razor Blade. Here's another Black novelist. This is an interesting book, set in rural Virginia around a Black and White family.

Speaker 1:

And I say.

Speaker 2:

Cosby similarly has a very, very powerful grasp of language that I'm enjoying Right.

Speaker 1:

Well, dr Freeman, thank you for joining us. Thank you for sharing your story, the story of the book, but then also Madame CJ Walker's story as a philanthropist through the book. And, yeah, I look forward to seeing the continued work that you do and hope that my listeners and my audience pick this book up. It's a great read and it's very much inspirational to me as someone who identifies as a philanthropist. So, thank you.

Speaker 2:

Thank you for the reflection and thank you for having me.

Speaker 1:

I really appreciate it. I'm really happy to have you here today. Thank you for joining this edition of entrepreneurial appetite. If you liked the episode, you can support the show by becoming one of our founding 55 patrons, which gives you access to our live discussions and bonus materials, or you can subscribe to the show. Give us five stars and leave a comment.