Cutting Off Access to Money Has Been a Weapon Against Civil Rights Movements

Black communities have always had to fight on two fronts: for our freedom and for the resources to sustain that fight.

In August 1964, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was 72 hours from running out of money in Mississippi. The bodies of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner had just been found. James Forman called Harry Belafonte for help. Belafonte raised $70,000 in two days.

Getting it to the organizers meant risking their lives. Belafonte and Sidney Poitier carried the cash into Mississippi, where SNCC field secretary Willie Blue picked them up. Klansmen pursued them in a pickup truck and tried to run them off the road. SNCC organizers drove out to meet them and escorted them safely into Greenwood.

The money got through because people organized to protect its passage. The freedom struggle needed both the dollars and a way to deliver them.

Today, some of the country’s largest charitable institutions can stop that delivery with an administrative decision.

This spring, after the Justice Department indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center, Fidelity Charitable, Vanguard Charitable, and the Schwab-affiliated DAFgiving360 blocked grants to it. The SPLC had not been convicted. Its tax-exempt status had not been revoked. Its donors still wanted to give. The sponsors refused.

Their power comes from a feature of donor-advised funds that donors can easily overlook. A donor contributes to a charitable account, generally receives an immediate tax deduction, and recommends grants over time. But once the contribution is made, the nonprofit sponsor legally controls the money. The donor advises. The sponsor decides.

That distinction puts organizations’ survival in hands their supporters may never have intended to empower.

According to ProPublica, the SPLC received $20 million through those three sponsors over three years. ProPublica also found that Fidelity Charitable and DAFgiving360 continued approving grants to other organizations facing government investigations of the kinds their policies cite as grounds for cutting off funds.

Sponsors have a duty to protect charitable assets. They should be able to explain why scrutiny disqualifies one organization while others keep receiving grants. They should also account for what happens when their decisions turn government accusations into financial punishment before a case is proved.

The danger is plain: an administration can weaken an organization by accusing it, while financial gatekeepers impose consequences that no court has ordered. The sponsors need not share the administration’s politics for their decisions to serve its purposes.

For organizations caught in that process, the bills arrive long before a verdict. Staff need paychecks. Meeting spaces need rent. Families need someone to answer the phone. Years of organizing can unravel when funding disappears. Other groups get the message: challenging power could cost you the resources to keep going.

A democracy cannot afford a funding system that penalizes organizations for confronting the powerful.

The sponsors should restore grants to the SPLC. If they believe a grant would violate the law or put charitable assets at risk, they should explain why, apply that standard consistently, and provide a meaningful appeal. An accusation alone should not become an indefinite funding ban.

Donors can act now by giving directly. They can demand written explanations for blocked grants, direct future contributions elsewhere, and transfer existing DAF balances to sponsors whose policies they trust.

We also have to build institutions that give Black communities greater control over the resources our work requires.

Black-led philanthropy, community funds, and giving circles already connect resources to people who know local needs and have a stake in meeting them. Black Freedom Fund is building donor-advised giving within an independent Black-led institution rooted in the communities it serves. The aim is to sustain Black-led work when that work comes under attack.

That commitment must be backed by accountability. Donors should know how decisions are made. Organizations should know what support they can count on and how to challenge a denial. Community members should help set priorities. Black leadership must come with real community authority.

And that authority cannot depend on the size of a check. Black communities have financed collective work for generations through church collections, membership dues, scholarship funds, and neighbors giving what they could. People who will never open a DAF still deserve a say in the institutions shaping their lives. Their knowledge and commitment belong at the center of the decisions.

Reliable, flexible funding gives organizations room to hire locally, develop leaders, respond to crises, and pursue work that takes years to win. It gives communities the power to set an agenda and stay with it when powerful people want them to stop.

In 1964, people risked their lives to get money to organizers who were risking theirs. They understood that a movement’s survival depended on protecting its means of support. We owe today’s organizers that same commitment.

Black freedom depends on keeping the money moving. No single gatekeeper should have the power to stop it.

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Nadine Smith is President and CEO of Color Of Change.