MacKenzie Scott: Philanthropy In An Age of Abandonment

By Stacy M. Brown
Senior National Correspondent
Black Press USA

There are moments in history when a single act of generosity reveals the moral decay of an entire nation. MacKenzie Scott’s $38 million gift to Alabama State University, the largest in its 158-year history, is such a moment. It is not merely a financial transaction, nor the casual benevolence of the wealthy. It is a moral indictment against a society that has grown indifferent to the suffering of its Black citizens, against a government that starves their schools, and against a class of newly rich who have forgotten the communal obligations of success.

Dr. Quinton T. Ross Jr., the university’s president, called it a defining moment for Alabama State, and indeed it is. His words ring with the gratitude of those who have built excellence in the face of deprivation.

“Ms. Scott’s generosity affirms Alabama State University’s reputation as a catalyst for excellence and innovation in higher education,” he said.

But her act is more than affirmation. It is a resurrection, and a call to remember that Black institutions remain the crucibles of America’s moral and intellectual power.

In recent weeks, Scott has dispersed her fortune with quiet conviction. Seventy million to the United Negro College Fund to strengthen endowments across 37-member schools; 63 million to Morgan State University, her second gift to that campus in less than five years; and one hundred and one million combined to Morgan State and the University of Maryland Eastern Shore in a span of days.

Her giving, unshackled by stipulations or vanity, stands in luminous contrast to an era defined by greed and indifference.

The plutocracy that dominates modern life often extracts from the many to enrich the few. Scott reverses that equation. She does not donate to dominate. She gives to repair. Her wealth, born of corporate conquest, has become the instrument of restoration. It stands as a redemption, perhaps, of what that very system has broken.

One cannot ignore the symbolism of her actions. At a time when the federal government withholds support from historically Black institutions, when affirmative action has been dismantled, and when diversity programs are vilified, a white woman from the highest ranks of privilege has become the single most consistent benefactor of Black education in the nation.

It is as though she has seen, from her rarefied vantage point, what America refuses to see: that the progress of its Black citizens is not a charity, but the measure of its own civilization.