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 20th 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.