Marygrove College Campus, Madame Cadillac Hall
Remarks of Rip Rapson, President, The Kresge Foundation

It is a profound honor to be a recipient of a Thurgood Marshall College Fund CEO Impact Award.

Some 30 years ago, when I was appointed to be Minneapolis’ deputy mayor, the Minneapolis Tribune ran a profile asking me to name the person who most influenced my values and career trajectory. As a lawyer seeking to advance the public interest, I didn’t have to hesitate—it was Thurgood Marshall. To receive an award in his name is, accordingly, a profoundly deep honor. Thank you.

In truth, however, I am accepting this award on behalf of the Kresge staff and trustees who have championed and supported HBCUs – as well as our staff who benefitted from an HBCU education – over the past 80 years.

This includes our vice president for program at Kresge, Benjy Kennedy, a proud Morehouse Man . . . as well as Venus Phillips, a Managing Director of our Investments Office and Erika Brice, both Howard Graduates . . . and our fabulous trustee Suzanne Shank, who serves on Spelman’s Board of Trustees. Let me also give special mention to Bill Moses, who has already been introduced several times today and who directs our Education Program, serves on President Biden’s Advisory Committee on HBCUs, and that Ashley Johnson of Bill’s team has been championing HCBUs since her time leading the Detroit College Access Network.

Marygrove

Let me say just a word about the significance of our location.

Although not an HBCU, Marygrove had a distinguished century-long history of educating thousands of Detroit’s residents – including many African-American women – to be the city’s nurses, teachers, and social workers. Like many colleges in the past few years, however, it faced declining enrollment and revenues, forcing it to shut down six years ago.  Kresge has played the central role in helping repurpose this campus to be one of the nation’s most extraordinary examples of a cradle-to-career public educational campus, again servicing the residents of the nearby Detroit neighborhoods– starting with early childhood and extending through post-secondary programs operated by the University of Michigan.

Kresge’s History with HCBUs                                                         

And as both Dr. Payne and Dr. Williams noted this is Kresge’s Centennial. It is simply not possible to understand Kresge’s history without understanding our commitment to HBCUs.

Indeed, a week after the Allies defeated the Nazis in Europe in May 1945, Kresge made its first grant to the newly formed United Negro College Fund. For the next 60 years, we provided grants to build facilities to a broad spectrum of HBCUs, including at Howard, Meharry Medical College, Clark Atlanta, Fisk, Philander Smith, Xavier, and Spelman, among others.

But in an exceptional break with our institution’s focus on capital campaigns, we also supported UNCF to build their own institutional capacity – in 1979 and 1992, we made grants to UNCF totaling $25.4 million and $32.9 million in today’s dollars. These were the most significant grants Kresge had ever made to a single organization at that time.

Over the next decade, HBCUs communicated clearly that they would value Kresge’s support in building their ability to raise money on a scale characteristic of predominantly white universities. In 1999, we accordingly embarked on an $18 million, five-year HBCU initiative to do just that at Bethune-Cookman College in Daytona Beach, Dillard and Xavier Universities in New Orleans, Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte, and Meharry Medical College in Nashville.

Each institution received different forms of support, including training, convening, mentoring, technical assistance, bonus grants, and access to nationally recognized consultants.

The results were so spectacular that we copied the operational model in South Africa, where we saw similar success, including at the University of the Western Cape, which is, effectively, a South African HBCU.

Since that program ended in 2005, we have supported HBCUs in a variety of ways:  helping to create UNCF’s Institute for Capacity Building . . . funding research on emergency grants . . . promoting green campuses . . . sponsoring Delaware State’s HBCU Philanthropy Symposium . . . underwriting books on HBCUs and their role in American society . . .  supporting preparation for accreditation . . . enhancing Black male teacher education at Jackson State University.

We’ve been delighted to support the planning and design of Thurgood Marshall’s technology-based “Near Completer” initiative, which helps former HBCU students get over the graduation finish line at five HBCUs – including Dr. Ross’ Alabama State – and two Predominantly Black Institutions.  With its lead partner, Delaware State, Thurgood Marshall is considering expanding to another dozen HBCUs.

Our Enduring Commitment

This long history of investing in HBCUs begs the question: Why?

First, and foremost, it is a matter of equity and justice.

More than one hundred years ago, W.E.B. Dubois said:

We want our children educated . . .  Education is the development of power and ideal. We want our children trained as intelligent human beings should be, and we will fight for all time against any proposal to educate black boys and girls simply as servants and underlings or simply for the use of other people. They have a right to know, to think, to aspire.

De Bois’ vision is utterly fundamental, incontrovertible, and inalienable: the right to know, to think, to aspire. And yet it has taken the collective will, skill, and authority of institutions like Thurgood Marshall, UNCF, and countless others working over centuries to move within striking distance of such an ideal.  As President Biden remarked just a very few weeks ago: “An education makes you free, but an HBCU education makes you fearless.”

HBCUs provide, moreover, an oasis in which Black students can build and nurture resilient social bonds, pursue pathways to personal and professional fulfillment, and cultivate a powerful cadre of Black excellence and leadership across the full spectrum of American life.

Second, it is inextricably interlinked with the foundation’s broader post-secondary education strategy.

That strategy has three legs:

1. Developing pathways to college for both traditionally aged students and adults;
2. Building the capacity of institutions that serve those students – specifically HBCUs, other Minority-Serving Institutions, community colleges, and public universities; and
3. Strengthening the connection of support systems beyond a single institution’s walls that are essential to student success – whether housing, food, transit, or human services.

Third, it acknowledges how this nation must build an opportunity economy for the future.

• Although HBCUs make up only 3% of U.S. colleges and universities, they enroll 10% of all African Americans and produce 20% of all African American college graduates. And through the 54 public HBCUs Thurgood Marshall supports, you reach some 80% of those students;
• HBCUs elevate students from lower-income backgrounds to higher post-graduate incomes at nearly double the rate of predominantly white institutions.
• HBCUs produce 70% of all Black doctors, 80% of Black judges, 40% of Black engineers, and 40% of all Black undergraduates in physics, chemistry, astronomy, environmental science, math, and biology;
• HBCUs – well, actually, one in particular – have given us the nation’s only Black Vice President.

Looking Forward

So, how might Kresge be relevant and helpful to you – and to HBCUs generally – in these next critical years?

We are humbled and grateful to bear witness to the rising group of large benefactors to HBCUs and historically Black colleges – it has been breathtaking to see Bloomberg Philanthropies’ staggering gift of $600 million or Mackenzie’s Scott’s of $560 million. But these, in fact, build on decades of giving from Black leaders in business, entertainment, education, and other fields – Robert Smith’s pathbreaking gift to Morehouse, Oprah’s gifts of a similar magnitude, and so many others.

It puts into perspective what a small Midwest foundation like ours can do.

But we believe that we can, in fact, do four things.

First, we want to help HBCUs regain revenues historically denied by states to address physical infrastructure, financial aid, and research support.

Dr. Williams powerfully made this case. It is vitally important. Enough said. You are on the front lines, and American society needs your leadership.

Second, we want to support several HBCUs to transition from R2 to R1 status.

It is essential that HBCUs be meaningfully represented at the critical research tables our country needs – and to provide opportunities for HBCU students to get the cutting-edge training that will help them to graduate.

Third, we want to strengthen HBCUs ability to be strong place-based partners within their community. 

History is replete with examples of the power of your institutions to anchor, stabilize, and promote the social and economic health of your surrounding communities.

Think, for example, of the extraordinary community building in the West End and Martin Luther King Drive Districts of the colleges in the Atlanta University Center Consortium – Clark Atlanta University, Morehouse College, Morehouse School of Medicine, the International Theological Center, and Spelman College.

And fourth, we can – and today announce that we will – build the enrollment pipeline to HBCUs from Detroit. 

For Detroit Public School graduates, six of the top 10 out-of-state destination colleges are HBCUs.  But the resources to do that aren’t always there.

We are accordingly creating two permanent $1 million Detroit HBCU endowment funds:  one at Thurgood Marshall College Fund and a second at its sister organization supporting private HBCUs: UNCF.

We wanted to create a Detroit HBCU Fund, not a Kresge HBCU fund, to encourage other donors to come forward to recognize the importance HBCUs play in our community. To enhance Kresge’s gift, we are also starting a Kresge staff campaign to contribute to the Fund.

And as a carrot to our $1 million grant to TMCF and $1 million to UNCF, we are also announcing that we will provide another $500,000 to each organization if they can raise a $500,000 match.  All told, we hope to provide at least $3 million in funding to support Detroiters to go to HBCUs – and hope other foundations, corporations and individuals will join us in making these donations.

Conclusion

The words of a powerful Black political leader furnish sobering context to where we find ourselves today. She said:

We are a people in a quandary about the present. We are a people in search of our future. We are a people in search of a national community. . . .

Many fear the future, many are distrustful of their leaders, and believe that their voices are never heard. Many seek only to satisfy their private work wants. To satisfy private interests.

But this is the great danger America faces. That we will cease to be one nation and become instead a collection of interest groups: city against suburb, region against region, individual against individual. Each seeking to satisfy private wants.

If that happens, who then will speak for America?

Who then will speak for the common good?

Those words were spoken by Congresswoman Barbara Jordan at her historic keynote address to the Democratic National Convention in 1976.

Fifty years on, and everything has changed—everything and yet so little. We are still in a quandary about who we are as a nation and where we will head, perhaps as never before.

For many of us, the last few years have been like having the anesthetic wear off after a serious operation – little by little, comes the dawning realization that something is profoundly different. Our deepest communal values – based on solid American concepts of public responsibility for the common good – seem to have been shed inexorably until we’re left with a dominant social and political ethic that enshrines individualism as the ultimate public virtue.

The effects are corrosive.  Subordinating an ethic of long-term investment to an obsession with grabbing what we can now . . . Casting aside compassion for those less fortunate in favor of a deification of those who have achieved positions of privilege . . . Dismantling structures of mutual assistance in favor of electoral expediency and gesture politics.

I can think of no institutions in our society more important to reversing these effects than our nation’s Black colleges and universities. Inspiring young people to a different set of aspirations. Opening their awareness to their God-given gifts. Teaching them to dream. Giving them the tools to succeed.

Philanthropy has no higher obligation than to help others understand how crucial your role is. We have to be full partners as you make the case – in local, state, and national arenas of public policy – that you deserve the kind of support that will secure your future success.

I am profoundly humbled by your work and, again, in that spirit, honored to receive this award on behalf of the foundation I serve.

Thank you