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THURSDAY
NOVEMBER 28, 2002

Wealth added to desire equals black philanthropy

Several months ago, during a keeping-in-touch lunch, a friend of mine, a white man asked a question that I suspect took some courage to pose.  He want to know whether the members of the black middle and upper classes take any interest in or responsibility for those left behind in poverty and ghettos.  Do they engage actively in philanthropy on behalf of those who can't hey help themselves?

Some people I know would have become indignant-- of course we do and how could any decent informed person be unaware of that?

I try as a matter of personal policy not to react with anger to any sincerely asked question, figuring it's better to light even a small candle than to curse someone's mental darkness.

And in very real sense, my friend was not responsible for his ignorance.  Truth be told, I, as a member of the communications media, probably was more responsible than he.  Because his industry, on both its entertainment and news sides, has fostered an image of blacks as almost invariably the recipients of assistance and philanthropy, and never contributors of it.

(I suspect it is this demeaning image that, at least in part, drives the slavery reparations movement.  Goes the thinking: "We seek not anyone's charity, but our own entitlement, our inheritance, our due.")

But it has never been true that blacks are not givers of philanthropy, says Emmett D. Carson, president and CEO of The Minneapolis Foundation and a student of the history of black philanthropy.

For very legitimate historical reasons, he says, it hasn't been philanthropy in the grand sense of a Rockefeller or a Carnegie.  "It has been a philanthropy of small gifts aggregated to do great things."

Only relatively recently, he said, have any blacks amassed the sort of fortunes that may allow them to do at death what John D. Rockefeller and others from the era of the robber barons did: endow great foundations that can perpetuate their names and their names and their fortunes for decades, even centuries, into the future.  Oprah Winfrey is one whose name suggests itself in this connection: business executives like Kenneth Chenault of American Express and Richard Parsons of AOL Time-Warner may also be.

But you don't need to be as rich as Croesus or create a foundation to engage in philanthropy.  All you need is a bit of surplus wealth and the desire.  And thanks to the advances of the last 40 years, a substantial number of blacks have both.

The National Center for Black Philanthropy was created three years ago both to stoke interest among blacks in giving (80 percent already do so) and to teach them, in the words of Rodney M. Jackson, the organization's president, "how to be strategic in their giving."

The center sponsors conferences and assorted other activities to teach its members the legal ins and outs of giving stock, using their wills for philanthropic giving and all the other intricacies involved in giving away one's money.

Of course, there are some people who have been doing this for years without any instruction.  Dempsey Travis, the South Side real estate mogul and author, is one such.

Travis says he has been giving away money for the last quarter century, principally in the form of college scholarships for graduates of Chicago public schools and for quite self-conscious reasons of racial uplift.  "There's a need for somebody's black arm to reach out" to these children, he said.

But his most recent benefaction -- $250,000 for the children's ophthalmologic clinic at the University of Chicago hospital -- may be important in a way none of the others is.  Nobody can recall another gift of that size to the university by a black donor, a spokesman said.

The size may be less important than the recipient.  The University of Chicago in not an institution typically believed to have a black clientele.  But it is in the middle of one of the biggest -- and poorest -- black communities in the country.  And according to Dr. Terry Ernest, head of the ophthalmology department at the hospital, 60-70 percent of the pediatrics are on Medicaid.

Those kids also need a "black arm to reach out" to them.  And as more such arms reach out in imitation of Travis' example, it's a good bet the university will learn to be more responsive to them and their concerns.

Don Wycliff is the Tribune's public editor.  E-mail: dwycliff@tribune.com