These donations are part of a bid she announced in to quickly dedicate most of her fortune to charity. Scott, previously married to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, is not making a splash just because of the size of her donations.
She has an unusually unrestrictive get-out-of-the-way approach. She sees the standard requirements that universities and other organizations report to funders on their progress as burdensome distractions. Instead of negotiating detailed agreements before making a gift, she works with a team of advisers to stealthily vet a wide array of nonprofits, colleges and universities from afar before surprising them with her unprecedented multimillion-dollar gifts that come without any strings attached.
Scott is also supporting students of color through donations to the United Negro College Fund and the Thurgood Marshall College Fund , which give HBCU students scholarships, and by supporting many other colleges and universities that enroll large numbers of minority students.
Her approach sharply contrasts with how many wealthy white donors have interacted with Black-serving nonprofits, including HBCUs, in the past. As a historian of philanthropy , I have studied the paternalism of white funders , including those who helped many of these schools open their doors. These institutions were lifelines for Black Americans seeking higher education during decades of Jim Crow segregation that locked them out of other colleges and universities.
Although many white philanthropists made large gifts to these schools, their support was fraught with prejudice. White philanthropists including Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller had poured millions from their fortunes into the proliferation of Black industrial schools by the early 20th century. The vocational curriculum at these schools was promoted as preparing Black students to be skilled laborers and academic teachers.
