The Radical Fund Behind Brown v. Bd. of Ed. - reviewed by Michelle Adams

 The Radical Fund Behind Brown v. Bd. of Ed. - review by Michelle Adams

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 [U Michigan Law School]

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.”