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What a Gospel of Giving Can Teach Us
Rev. Andrew Warner
Dear Colleagues,
Recently, I wondered how people navigated the end of Reconstruction and the start of Jim Crow. How did people adapt to fragile freedoms, just won, succumbing to the retrograde politics of white supremacy?
Madame C. J. Walker, an entrepreneurial African American woman, built a very successful beauty company during the Jim Crow Era. People mostly remember her for her business acumen. However, Tyrone McKinley Freeman’s Madame C.J. Walker’s Gospel of Giving calls attention to her philanthropy and roots it in African American culture. (Check out the book https://gospelofgiving.com/ or an interview with Dr. Freeman https://www.youtube.com/watch v=OhQXAqVhoP4).
Madame C.J. Walker started out as Sarah Breedlove. She moved over the course of her life from the rural south, where her parents were sharecroppers, to St. Louis, Indianapolis, and New York. Along the way, Walker benefited from the nascent organizations of African American communities. Even as a single mother raising children and working as a laundress, Walker gave her time and financial resources to help build up those institutions. That commitment continued throughout her life as she helped build transformative institutions in the African American community. Freeman notes, “Every gift she gave was one she once needed.”
Faced with resurgent white supremacy and the loss of political freedoms, Madame C.J. Walker used her resources to build institutions. Her example challenges me to think about how I use my own resources to build stronger institutions.
More broadly, Madame C.J. Walker offers an alternative to the dominant cultural image of philanthropy. American culture often celebrates people who make a tremendous fortune and then, near the end of their lives, use some of it for philanthropic gifts (e.g., Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller). Madame C.J. Walker didn’t fit that mold but instead embodied what Dr. Freeman calls a “Gospel of Giving.”
As Dr. Freeman writes, “The history of African American philanthropy has been the search for hospitality in a land of hostility… Black people used whatever means were available to them to make life more tolerable and navigable during their long-suffering and uncertain trek toward freedom and equality.”
Dr. Freeman sees five common elements in Walker’s philanthropy and that of other African American women of her era:
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Proximity: Walker lived and gave in close identification with the people she helped - not “those people in need” but “my people.”
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Resource-fullness: She kept adapting how she helped people. Sometimes, it looked like a charitable gift; other times, it was giving a job, offering a discount, or investing in a business to help other African American women start their own salons.
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Collaboration: Walker grew up amid a rich tradition of people helping each other to solve community challenges.
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Incrementalism: Dr. Freeman explains, “She gave while being a struggling, penniless migrant, and so anyone can give regardless of their station. Further, rather than being resource-dependent, this mode of giving was context-dependent.” She gave every day of her life.
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Joy: Much of philanthropy focuses on more rational motivations and impact statements for explaining the importance of giving. Walker centered her giving on her heart – it gave her joy.
As I consider my own life in light of Walker’s Gospel of Giving, I’m particularly struck by her incrementalism. I want to reflect more on how “context-dependent giving” would change how and how much I give. It also makes me think about the ways I engage my adult sons in giving. Her Gospel of Giving made me realize how I’ve encouraged my sons to sign up for 401ks with their employers but not had sustained conversations on their own giving.
I encourage you to join me in exploring how Madam C.J. Walker's example can inform your own giving and the ways your congregation talks about money. We can all learn from her Gospel of Giving.
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