A central purpose of philanthropy over time has been African American education.

Public and private philanthropies (religious, secular, white, black) helped educate former slaves and their descendants. Philanthropies included the Freedmen's Bureau; many church organizations, including the American Baptist Home Mission Society, American Missionary Association, and African Methodist Episcopal Church; the Peabody Educational Fund (1867); Slater Fund (1882); Southern Education Board and General Education Board (1902), both endowed by oil magnate John D. Rockefeller; and the Carnegie Foundation (1905). The Jeanes Fund (1908) and Phelps-Stokes Fund (1910) financed rural schools; the Rosenwald Fund (1912), awarding matching grants, maintained its school construction program; and the Rockefeller Foundation (1913) supported high school and college academic and vocational programs. Foundations operated within the limits of segregation. Yet they assisted blacks’ freedom by supporting universal schooling, which enslaved and free blacks pursued long before the Civil War. Literacy empowered blacks. Black denominations, for example, funded twenty-two of the seventy-two private Negro colleges and universities in 1917. Administrators founded the United Negro College Fund (1944) for mutual aid, partly by getting federal, Rockefeller, Ford Foundation (1936), and other assistance. Similar to others, Ford's help preceded the 1954 Brown decision and continues today. Contemporary black philanthropists, among them Bill Cosby and Oprah Winfrey, are also vital donors.