John Fabian Witt ’90 Discussed His New Book ‘The Radical Fund’ at GFS

As he looked out over the GFS Upper Schoolers filling the benches in the Barbara & David Loeb Performing Arts Center, John Fabian Witt ’90 shared the premise for his new book, The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America—a premise that he hoped would resonate with the teenage audience.

“This is a book about a group of young people—actually not much older than you—who came together around an inheritance that a young man refused,” Witt said, “and it launched a two-decade conversation as they tried to figure out how to make the world a better place with free speech, civil rights, and workers' equality.”

The young man Witt referenced was Charles Garland, the grandson of a Civil War investment banker, who in 1922, routed his million-dollar inheritance into the Garland Fund. This fund, the activists who administered it, and the social movements that it helped to seed, like the modern Civil Rights and labor movements, are the subjects of Witt’s gripping historical non-fiction book.

He spoke two times at Germantown Friends School about The Radical Fund: on Thursday, December 4, at a Community Writers Series event in the Friends Free Library, and on Friday, December 5, at the 21st Annual Alumni Speaker Assembly.

This is Witt’s third book; his previous books include Lincoln’s Code: The Laws of War in American History, which won the 2013 Bancroft Prize and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and American Contagions: Epidemics and the Law from Smallpox to COVID-19, published in 2020. He is the Duffy Class of 1960 Professor of Law and a Professor of History at Yale, where he teaches and writes on the history of American law and the law of torts. 

His skill as a teacher and his passion for the subject material were on full display as he articulated the concepts in his book and enthusiastically fielded questions from the two student moderators from the Upper School Social Justice class, as well as students in the audience.

“If you could put one of the visionaries from the fund into today's world, who would it be, and why would they be good at solving our current problems?” asked Sophia McCrea ’27, one of the student moderators.

Witt responded by talking about A. Philip Randolph, a Black man who grew up in Jacksonville, Florida during Jim Crow and moved to New York as a young adult. Randolph was a civil rights activist, a prominent voice in the labor rights movement, and the founder of the African-American-run labor union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. His ongoing activism led to President Franklin D. Roosevelt's executive order banning discrimination in the defense industries, and President Harry S. Truman’s executive orders promoting anti-discrimination policies in federal government hiring and ending racial segregation in the armed services.

“Starting in the 1920s, Randolph spent 50 years of his life organizing Black workers on railroads,” Witt said. “The reason I chose him is not only does he have this amazing life course, but he thought that what America needed was to organize ordinary people across racial differences. And you all have encountered his work because in 1963, there was a March on Washington inspired by him.”

“What is the best lesson we can take from the Garland Fund story that would help us to make big positive changes in our own world right now?” asked Josie Hong-Goranin ’27, the other student moderator. 

Witt explained how the activists involved with the Garland Fund lived in a world not dissimilar from our own: a world of billions of people in capitalist economies dominated by large companies, changing views on immigration, surging forms of white nationalism, and staggering economic inequality. The clearest lesson we can draw from those activists, he argued, was their focus on work that would add to the prosperity of many millions of people. 

“They tried to bring every American along on their projects, even as they disagreed with one another,” he said. “And when I look out at the world today, I see a world of astonishing and unjustifiable economic inequality, a world in which there are opportunities to try to connect people together around their shared interests in adding prosperity to ordinary Americans all over the country.”

Witt researched and wrote The Radical Fund over the span of 13 years. He first encountered the Garland Fund as a footnote in books and articles about the landmark civil rights Supreme Court case, Brown v. Board of Education. It was a grant made by the Garland Fund in 1930 that launched the litigation campaign that eventually led to that case.

“I started peeling away the layers to get into that world and it turned out that they were a completely fascinating group of human beings who argued, disagreed, and managed to forge some amazing connections in a period in which they were deeply out of power,” Witt noted.

His research took him across the country to archives at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library, The Library of Congress, the University of Texas, Stanford University, and others. The papers, letters, meeting notes, and other materials opened up the detailed and sometimes very personal inner lives of the Garland Fund activists.

“That’s why I do this: [the research] adds a dimension of time travel that makes the work so compelling, constantly toggling back and forth between our world and theirs, seeing all sorts of parallels,” Witt said.

The long and involved process of writing the book was one of the key personal lessons Witt said he gained from this endeavor. He shared with the students: 

“Working on a project that takes a long time can be really meaningful when you finish it and get to share it with groups of people.” 

There was a political lesson he also took away from the experience, too. 

“It's a story about the ways in which young people can change the world. When I am demoralized about the world we live in, which I confess happens sometimes, I can fall back on the idea that the world has been changed,” he said. “Behind the scenes there are all sorts of brilliant, young, charismatic people coming up with ideas that may in the future land in all sorts of unexpected ways.”

Watch the livestream recording from Witt’s Alumni Speaker Assembly, and view the photo albums from the event in the Library and from his Upper School lecture, including the special lunch and workshop with Upper School students that followed.