On April 7, 1938, 70-year-old W.E.B. Du Bois had invited his assistant editor to wait with him for the telephone call that would bring news that the board of trustees of the Rockefellers’ General Education Board had voted favorably to fund his "Encyclopedia Africana." This assistant remembers that Du Bois was so confident that the funding would go through that the senior scholar had with him a chilled bottle of champagne. However, the phone never rang and the money would never come.

I am venturing to address you on the subject of a Negro Encyclopedia. In celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Emancipation of the American Negro, I am proposing to bring out an Encyclopedia Africana covering the chief points in the history and condition of the Negro race.

Today, it is fair to assume that many philanthropists and foundation leaders would celebrate both the Carnegie Corporation’s decision to fund An American Dilemma and the study’s ultimate impact in the United States. At the same time, contemporary philanthropists and philanthropic managers likely would say that they, unlike their predecessors in philanthropy, never would have left Du Bois out to dry. At the very least, they would have funded both studies. After all, W.E.B. Du Bois was a celebrated African-American scholar whose encyclopedia not only aimed to dispel whites’ racial prejudice against blacks, but also to stimulate racial pride among black Americans and Africans.

Read the source article at The Atlantic

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Maribel Morey is a twentieth-century U.S. historian and historian of U.S. philanthropies.