Organizations
If we stop to think about it, organizations are a major part of our daily lives. You may have gotten up this morning and gone to work. You may have used public transit to get there. You might have even stopped along the way to get coffee or breakfast at your favorite restaurant. All of these activities involved interacting with an organization. Just like people need food, air, water and shelter to survive, organizations need things too. I study how organizations get the resources they need. For example, what hiring procedures did the coffee shop use to find your favorite barista? Did the owners of the coffee shop use family money to start the business or apply for a bank loan?
Studying how organizations get the resources they need might seem irrelevant to our daily lives. But we depend on organizations for things like our health (think hospitals) and financial well-being (think jobs). So if a hospital turns away a low-income, Black patient because she can't afford to pay, then the hospital's resource needs are leading to unequal health outcomes for the rich and poor & for Black and White patients. That's something we all need to be concerned about. This volume brings together scholarship that helps us understand the origins and consequences of organizationally driven racial inequalities.
Black Colleges
A quarter of black Americans earn college degrees from black colleges. Notable alumni include W.E.B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King, Jr., John Lewis, Toni Morrison, Spike Lee, and Common to name just a few. Despite such accomplishments, questions about the necessity of black colleges continue. In this book, I investigate why this is the case. I focus on how the assumptions hidden within educational and social policy make it difficult for black colleges to get the resources and respect worthy of them.
Fundraising
One way for organizations to get resources is to make direct appeals to the public. The American Red Cross, the United Way, and the Ronald McDonald House all seek donations directly from the public. But what happens when the cause is more controversial than disaster relief or housing for sick children? For much of America's history, educating black people was a hotly contested issue. In the midst of this, the United Negro College Fund called on the American public to provide monetary support to a network of black colleges. I focus on how they crafted a message in light of the opposition to educating black people present at the time.
Donating
I learned about the small, but powerful group of industrial tycoons that gave money to black education when doing research for In the Face of Inequality. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., George Foster Peabody, and Andrew Carnegie are a few of the names I came across constantly. For my next project, I'm trying to understand how and why people like these men donated to black education. I'm especially interested in understanding the path that led to donating to issues related to black education. What type of people and organizations were these donors connected to? How did these connections facilitate donations to black education?