The Radical Fund Behind Brown

Guest Blogger

For the Balkinization symposium on John Witt, The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America (Simon and Schuster, 2025).

Michelle Adams

John Fabian Witt’s terrific new book, The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America, explores critical and urgent moral terrain—the “distinctly modern struggle for democratic power.” Witt tells a powerful and underappreciated story of the extraordinary experiment of the American Fund for Public Service—the so-called Garland Fund—and its wager that radical philanthropy might become a lever for social transformation.

The story opens with Charles Garland’s decision in 1920 to give away the inheritance he deemed morally tainted. Roger Baldwin, soon to be the founder of the ACLU, convinced Garland that his money could seed “a gamble in human nature,” an experiment in the uses of wealth for democracy. Baldwin envisioned the Fund not as a conventional foundation but as an engine for “fundamental transformations”—a tool to challenge “the present means of producing and distributing wealth.” Baldwin thought the central question of the time was “how to build democracy for an immense, racial divided country in the age of inequality, mass production, and mass communications.” Sound familiar?

For many readers, the Garland Fund may have been only a faint historical footnote. If they had heard of it at all, it was likely because its dollars helped finance Nathan Margold’s audacious blueprint for the NAACP’s legal campaign against the “unequal and inequitable distribution of public school funds as between the races.”

Before arriving at the NAACP, Margold had already seen how legal rights could be nullified by administrative neglect while representing Pueblo Indian tribes in New Mexico, where federal promises on paper were routinely violated in practice. That experience convinced him that democracy was not merely a matter of law but of governance — who controlled budgets, bureaucracies, and enforcement. So after Felix Frankfurter steered him toward the NAACP, Margold drafted a blueprint that aimed not simply to attack segregation in court but to restructure the machinery of southern education itself. Or, as W.E.B. Du Bois put it, “the real discrimination comes in the administration of these general laws.” Margold’s plan,” Witt writes, “substituted a flimsy right to integrated schooling for the more important goal of a decent education.”

Witt reminds us that for Margold, the goal was never integration for its own sake but transformation of the institutions that made equality possible. On page 432, he explains that Margold’s plan “substituted” the language of integration with a deeper structural demand—to expose the fiscal and moral bankruptcy of separate school systems by forcing states to meet the true costs of their inequality. Integration, in this view, was not a destination but a strategy: a way to make the republic confront the economic and administrative foundations of segregation itself. The aim was not simply to share space. “By attending to institutional structure,” Witt writes, “Margold aimed to advance the project of recouping Black people’s own tax dollars.”

After Margold came Charles Hamilton Houston. Like Margold before him, Houston drew directly on Garland Fund dollars. Traveling to Black colleges around the country, Houston told prospective law students he was building a laboratory for social change. “The Negro lawyer,” he explained in 1929, “must be trained as a social engineer.” Houston built Howard University Law School as a space where professional training would allow Black lawyers—like Thurgood Marshall—to “manage his community’s advancement.”

The Fund’s ideological divisions sometimes ran deeper than strategy. Witt recounts that one Communist member went so far as to call Charles Hamilton Houston an “Uncle Tom,” a charge that revealed just how wide the gulf had grown between the Fund’s various left-wing factions. For the Communists, Houston’s emphasis on education, litigation, and institutional reform looked like accommodation; for Houston, it was the only path to durable change.

The Fund’s internal debates foreshadowed a broader reckoning. In the early 1930s, the crises of race, class, and ideology would collide in Alabama. The trials of nine Black teenagers falsely accused of rape revealed that reasoned legal argument alone could not penetrate the racial order. As Houston told a Howard audience in 1935, Scottsboro “introduced the Negro to the possibilities and tactics of mass pressure” and “changed the emphasis of the Negro question from law to class.”

The school segregation cases have often been read as a middle-class project—the work of elite lawyers, funded by philanthropy, seeking respectability through the courts. A related critique is that those cases and Brown itself – grounded in “legal liberalism” – didn’t accomplish much worth celebrating. Or, as Witt characterizes it, “the joint NAACP-America Fund campaign, charged the critics, substituted courthouse triumphs for transformative change.” It is long past time to retire these understandings. These facile characterizations of one of the important legal struggles of the 20^th century are just that, facile. The Radical Fund shows us that in order to understand that litigation campaign one must also consider: James Weldon Johnson, Scottsboro, Native American land claims, The Brookwood Labor College, A. Phillip Randolph and The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Social change necessarily involves complexity; it is iterative, entrepreneurial and interdependent. Witt explains this powerfully on pages 378 and 379:

If Johnson and [Walter] White were right, they explained, then empowering the Black worker was ‘bound up with all of the major problems in which this Fund is interested: the problems of labor; wages and income, democracy, wealth and privilege,’ and more. None of these issues could be understood let alone resolved without reference to ‘the plight of the Negro.’ That was the lesson of the Sweet case, where the Fund’s support for the rights of a Black family in rapidly integrating Detroit had struck a blow for Black migrants’ rights to participate in the economic life of the city. The Pullman porters case weighed on the men’s minds, too, for though the porters’ effort had not been ‘a dead loss,’ it had also not been ‘as successful as had been hoped.’ Donating money to ‘legal labor organizations,’ they explained, seemed insufficient, in part because the field of such organizations had grown too vast. In any event, ‘the Negro does not dare organize today,’ Johnson and White continued, and ‘mere money’ could ‘do little’ to change that brute fact. The Committee on Negro Work therefore proposed a campaign run by the NAACP that would aim to alter the situation, ‘creating a psychological atmosphere favorable to bold, aggressive action.’ The campaign would be the very opposite of the Black Belt thesis. It would take advantage of all that the Fund and its members had learned about democratic change in the age of mass industry. And unlike the proposals of the Communist left, it would be doable.

The Radical Fund provides a genealogy of Brown v. Board of Education that reaches far beyond the courtroom. Witt situates the decision within a half-century experiment in democratic learning. The Fund’s directors, he reminds us, “believed that American democracy, if it had ever existed, disserved those who had the least” and that its institutions “needed to be radically remade for the modern age.”

As I read Witt’s narrative, I was reminded how easily we forget the infrastructures beneath social change. The Radical Fund restores them. It shows that before Brown, before the Warren Court, there was a small, fractious community of idealists who believed democracy had to be taught—and financed. Their experiment in radical giving linked race, labor, education, and law into a single project. In our own era—an age of inequality and disinformation not unlike the 1920s—The Radical Fund reads as an invitation to reconsider what democratic education still demands: not only schools and courts, but courage, organization, and the imagination to build anew.

Michelle Adams is Henry M. Butzel Professor of Law at Michigan Law School. You can reach her by e-mail at michadam@umich.edu.