Karen Ferguson. Top Down

As we look around at today's large philanthropic organizations, we might wonder how it came to be that so many seem to believe they have the most effective solutions for solving pressing social problems experienced by those living in poor and overwhelmingly minority urban areas without actually consulting those communities. In Top Down: The Ford Foundation, Black Power, and the Reinvention of Racial Liberalism, Karen Ferguson provides us with at least one plausible explanation for how this phenomenon began by describing the Ford Foundation's attempt during the late 1960s and 1970s to ease the rebellion, unrest, and upheaval erupting in urban areas through a strategy that focused on fixing what one foundation officer termed “the Negro Problem” in America. This was a period when black power was on the rise in these same communities, and for a time its fundamental tenets were embraced by the foundation's elite white patrician leadership. These were strange bedfellows indeed.

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