Introducing the Miami Institute: Why Grassroots, At Least at First

Note: In this second post introducing the Miami Institute, Maribel Morey describes in greater detail how the Miami Institute’s funding plans are inspired by the history of U.S. philanthropy and the lived experience of scholars in the social sciences. Specifically, Morey relates the history of the Rockefeller organizations, Carnegie Corporation, the Phelps Stokes Fund and their relative encouragement or disinterest in funding various projects proposed by W.E.B. Du Bois, Ralph Bunche, and Carter Woodson. (Please follow this link to read the other introductory posts).

In the first two years, the Miami Institute begins with a virtual platform and one staff member: the executive director. Over the next fifteen years, we expect the Miami Institute to develop in institutional structure in similar lines to the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton: With a solid community of permanent faculty members and an even larger community of temporary members visiting the Institute.

That said, the Miami Institute will grow at a slower pace than IAS and for two main reasons: the Miami Institute is being established during a global pandemic and it intends to depend exclusively on grassroots funding during the first two years of its existence (2020-2022). In this spirit, while IAS once enjoyed its inaugural class of four faculty members within three years of its incorporation, the Miami Institute plans to achieve the same between its tenth and fifteenth year (2030-2035).

In embracing this financial model, the Miami Institute not only acknowledges the economic consequences of the current COVID-19 pandemic, but also applies lessons learned from research in the history of U.S. philanthropy and knowledge production in the social sciences. The Miami Institute, after all, is inspired by the role of elite philanthropy in shaping authoritative knowledge on the Global Majority in the social sciences both within and outside of the United States during the first half of the twentieth century.

Learning from this research and looking to the present, the Miami Institute will remain vigilant to the ways that leading philanthropies’ and scholars’ analytical tools in producing knowledge in the social sciences can reproduce discrimination and bias against the Global Majority. This is a topic of which I wrote about in 2017, “Scientific Knowledge on Minority Groups during the Trump Era.”

This historical research also has informed the Institute’s decision that maintaining some proximity to the elite academe and philanthropies in the Global North is important to achieving transformative change in the construction of knowledge in the social sciences.

In reaching these conclusions, I specifically relate archival research conducted for my forthcoming book, tracing networks of elite U.S. philanthropic managers, their advisers, and grantees in the U.S. and throughout colonial Africa and Europe in the early 20th century: White Philanthropy: Carnegie Corporation’s An American Dilemma and the Making of a White World Order (forthcoming with UNC Press, 2021). Precisely, I have had in mind the Rockefeller organizations, Carnegie Corporation, the Phelps Stokes Fund and their relative encouragement or disinterest in funding various projects proposed by three Black U.S. scholars in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s: W.E.B. Du Bois, Ralph Bunche, and Carter Woodson.

Compared to Carter Woodson, for example, W.E.B. Du Bois and Ralph Bunche enjoyed much more proximity to these elite U.S. philanthropies at the time, with Du Bois and Bunche both meeting personally and repeatedly with key figures employed at these institutions, such as Carnegie Corporation President Frederick Keppel and Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal, who directed the Study of Black Americans commissioned by Keppel in the 1930s, which became An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944).

This proximity to elite philanthropies facilitated W.E.B. Du Bois’s and Ralph Bunche’s visibility and influence within these elite white circles in the first half of the twentieth century. That said, the two men enjoyed influence within these elite white circles only in specific and fragmented ways. For example, leaders at the Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Phelps Stokes groups acknowledged Du Bois’s scholarly genius—and supported him at times through grants-in-aids to complete or kick-start a project, such as Du Bois’s plans to establish a “Phylon Institute for economic study and planning among American Negroes” at Atlanta University. However, these elite philanthropic leaders repeatedly questioned Du Bois’s ability to steer social science research that would be ‘objective,’ and relatedly from their perspective, helpful in stabilizing ‘race relations,’ or as these white men assumed, in establishing new equilibriums in white supremacy and Black subordination both within and outside the United States. In this way, and even as these white men in philanthropy could not ignore Du Bois's scholarly brilliance and achievement, they truncated his efforts to develop his Pan-African work—work intended to fortify greater unity among the African diaspora—whether it was his appeal to travel to South Africa or his hopes to coordinate a Pan-African encyclopedia. 

Similarly, these elite white philanthropies and their networks of grantees in the U.S. academe carved a role for Ralph Bunche. Though as with Du Bois, they marginalized Bunche’s more egalitarian arguments, which Bunche had expressed vividly in A World View of Race (1936). In 1936, Bunche argued that Black freedom in the United States was directly dependent on a global challenge to white capitalist imperialism and required a unified class struggle. Bunche’s tenure in the late 1930s and into the early 1940s as one of Gunnar Myrdal’s closest associates and interlocutors on the Carnegie Corporation’s national study of Black Americans, would prove to be a critical turning point in Bunche’s willingness to share or pursue publicly his vision for equality in A World View of Race.

For various reasons in the late 1940s—including personal proclivity, intellectual inclinations, and likely too, their varying life stages (Du Bois was in his 70s while Bunche was still in his 30s)—Du Bois drew much greater distance from these elite white circles than Bunche ultimately did. In doing so, Du Bois created for himself greater intellectual space from this white network than Bunche ever was able to achieve. In the 1940s and 1950s, for example, W.E.B. Du Bois became ever more publicly critical of white imperialism within and beyond the U.S., with the publications of Dusk of Dawn (1940), Color and Democracy: The Colonies and Peace (1945), and The World and Africa (1947). By contrast, Ralph Bunche’s publicly critical voice weakened, with A World View of Race being his strongest and most significant critique of white capitalist supremacy.

Relatedly in the 1940s and 1950s, Bunche gained greater access to prestige and power within elite white circles at the national and international levels. Working for the United States government, Bunche served as an Office of Strategic Services (OSS) analyst and adviser to the military on Africa and other colonial areas of strategic importance to the U.S. military during World War II. Bunche then went on to serve in the United Nations. And for his work at the UN, Bunche later won one of the most coveted prizes in elite white circles, becoming the first Black person to win the Nobel Peace Prize.

By comparison, Du Bois had few if any effective protectors in the Global North, and in fact, became pariah of the U.S. government. In the 1950s, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) investigated Du Bois for suspected Communist ties; and in 1951, he was indicted (though later acquitted) as a suspected foreign agent.

In 1961, Du Bois left the United States for Ghana, where Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah had suggested the elderly Black U.S. scholar could recommence work on the encyclopedia Africana; a project close to Du Bois’s heart. Ultimately, Du Bois passed away before he could fully coordinate the pan-African encyclopedia’s rebirth. 

Informed by the varying careers and experiences of Du Bois and Bunche with elite U.S. philanthropy, the Miami Institute initially will rely on grassroots funding. In this way, the Institute aims to maintain sufficient intellectual and financial space from elite white networks in the academe and philanthropy to produce meaningful, and relatedly disruptive, research on the Global Majority in the social sciences. In this way too, and early on, the Institute will internalize its need to remain forever and principally accountable to the Global Majority.

That said, and again informed by the lives of W.E.B. Du Bois and Ralph Bunche—and yet too, Carter Woodson’s own difficulties financing The Journal of Negro History and making the Journal disrupt white scholars’ ‘authoritative’ knowledge on Black life in the United States—the Miami Institute intends after two years to create a structured plan for including support from elite philanthropy in the Global North. This is an acknowledgement that dialogue with elite philanthropies in the Global North, as with elite universities in the Global North, is necessary in order to disrupt authoritative knowledge production in the social sciences.

After fine-tuning our institutional voice during these first two years of existence, the Miami Institute thus will create a strategic and focused plan on securing funding—not only at the grassroots level, but also—among elite Global North philanthropies. But this support, as Du Bois and Woodson likely would have advised, should not come with the cost of compromising our core mission and vision, which the Miami Institute will be honing during its first two years.

The Miami Institute’s plans for funding and institutional growth thus reflect the Institute’s efforts to achieve the fine balance between creating institutional and financial independence from elite white actors in the academe and philanthropy in order to disrupt their overwhelming power over the construction of authoritative knowledge in the social sciences, and yet too, sufficient dialogue with these elite white spaces in the Global North to actually achieve the Institute’s disruptive goals in these scholarly fields.

-Maribel Morey, Founder and Founding Executive Director, Miami Institute for the Social Sciences

List of Sources:

Jonathan Scott Holloway, Confronting the Veil: Abram Harris Jr., E. Franklin Frazier, and Ralph Bunche, 1919-1941 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).

_________________________, “Ralph Bunche and the Responsibilities of the Public Intellectual,” The Journal of Negro Education 7, no. 2 (Spring 2004).

José Itzigsohn and Karida L. Brown, The Sociology of W.E.B. Du Bois: Racialized Modernity and the Global Color Line (New York: New York University Press, 2020).

Donald Johnson, “W.E.B. Du Bois, Thomas Jesse Jones and the Struggle for Social Education, 1900-1930,” The Journal of Negro History, 85 (Summer 2000).

David Levering Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963 (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2000).

Maribel Morey, White Philanthropy: Carnegie Corporation’s An American Dilemma and the Making of a White World Order (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021; forthcoming).

Aldon D. Morris, The Scholar Denied: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2015).

The Oxford W.E.B. Du Bois, ed., Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

“Ralph Bunche: Facts,” The Nobel Prize website, at https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1950/bunche/facts/.

Ralph Johnson Bunche: Public Intellectual and Nobel Peace Laureate (ed. Beverly Lindsay) (Champagne-Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2007).

Pearl T. Robinson, “Ralph Bunche and African Studies: Reflections on the Politics of Knowledge,” African Studies Review, 51, no. 1 (April 2008).

Brian Urquhart, Ralph Bunche: An American Odyssey (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1993).

W.E.B. Du Bois, Race, and the City: The Philadelphia Negro and Its Legacy, eds. Michael B. Katz and Thomas J. Sugrue (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998).

Tiffany Willoughby-Herard, Waste of a White Skin: Carnegie Corporation and the Racial Logic of White Vulnerability (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2015).