Philanthropy in Black Higher Education Hardcover

Vida L. Avery

This work describes and analyzes the circumstances surrounding the creation and development of the Atlanta University System (later the Atlanta University Center). The affiliation in 1929 of Atlanta University, Morehouse College, and Spelman College was a monumental event, and John Hope, the first black president of both Morehouse College and Atlanta University—and simultaneously president at both of them—was key to its taking place. In recounting the circumstances surrounding the affiliation, Vida L. Avery brings to the fore a little-told aspect of the affiliation: the relationships Hope cultivated with industrial philanthropists of his time. These relationships went beyond the simple categories of benefactor and recipient, playing a major role in creating a unique higher educational center for black Americans.

9781137281005

English

Palgrave Macmillan

290

Vida L. Avery, PhD, is Manager of Resource Development over the Texas Center for Grants Development at Harris County Department of Education in Houston, Texas, USA. She is a co-author of the book Race, Gender and Leadership in Nonprofit Organizations (2011) and instructs courses at Rice University's Center for Philanthropy and Nonprofit Leadership.

The story of black higher education in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—the leaders that envisioned it and the philanthropists that supported it—is a complex one that needs to be told. Thank you, Vida L. Avery, for telling it so well!—Beverly Daniel Tatum, President, Spelman College, USA