Remember when the Atlanta Journal–Constitution published a pathbreaking series on racial discrimination in awarding home mortgages? The Color of Money won a Pulitzer1 and put juice into community-based organizations, academics, and newspapers uncovering patterns of racial discrimination—or redlining—in bank mortgage and home improvement lending practices. Just as the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) requires banks to report on their mortgages and loans, should philanthropic redlining in U.S. philanthropy be remedied by a mandatory reporting regime?

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Somehow, the Smithsonian’s leadership keeps giving and giving and giving (startlingly good examples of how to manage badly).

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We reported in the last issue of CR about the plight of black farmers and the nonprofits that were fighting on their behalf to secure justice. Even though a positive court decision supported the farmers’ rights, the federal government’s lack of diligent follow-up on the case has attracted the attention of Senators Barack Obama and Chuck Grassley in the Senate, and Congressmen Bobby Scott and Steve Chabot, in writing and supporting a bill that would extend the opportunity for black farmers to file for restitution for discrimination suffered at the hands of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

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The subtext of film The Great Debaters was the dual life of the character played by Denzel Washington, by day a professor at Wiley College in Texas coaching the debate team, by night an organizer for the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, established during the Great Depression to help black—and white—farmers. Fast forward to today, the plight of black farmers is still an issue in the wake of the landmark but unfulfilled class action lawsuit, Pigford v. Glickman, [i ]but it is not on the public’s radar screen—nor of national politicians, except for that of Barack Obama.

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A former Legal Services attorney, California Congressman Xavier Becerra is the only Latino on the House of Representatives Ways and Means Committee. But it is his distinctive voice and perspective, not his ethnicity, that has vaulted him to a position of visibility on issues of charity and philanthropy.

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