In 1922, Charles Garland, then 21, rejected a million-dollar inheritance, opting instead to invest in a future where radical ideas like economic equality and social justice could flourish. Over the next two decades, the Garland Fund, though dwarfed by the charitable foundations of industrial titans like Carnegie and Rockefeller, would become a crucible for progressive thought. The Garland Fund would go on to fund the work of the NAACP, including Thurgood Marshall’s first salary and the cases laying the groundwork for Brown v. Board of Education.
Join us for an illuminating discussion with Professor John Fabian Witt on his new book—The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America—and its lasting impact on American society.
Professor Witt is the Duffy Class of 1960 Professor of Law at Yale Law School and Professor of History at Yale University. He is the author of Lincoln’s Code: The Laws of War in American History, which won the Bancroft Prize, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, received the American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel Award, and was a New York Times Notable Book. He is a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a former Head of College at Yale’s Davenport College. He teaches annually in the Warrior-Scholar Project Academic Boot Camp for enlisted veterans and has launched a course on the history of the U.S. Constitution for secondary school teachers and other educators through the Gilder-Lehrman Institute of American History. Professor Witt holds a B.A., J.D., and Ph.D. degrees from Yale and served as a law clerk to Judge Pierre N. Leval in the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.