"In many ways, the history of the United Negro College Fund is also a history of the private black colleges and universities that it represents: a chronicle of their struggles in the mid-twentieth century to break free of ties to white industrial philanthrophy and to forge identities as promoters of black culture and educational opportunity. This story of black leadership and agency amidst tumultuous change in race relations in the United States crisscrosses the lives of such civil rights luminaries and black college graduates as W. E. B. Du Bois, Benjamin E. Mays, Sadie T. M. Alexander, Martin Luther King Jr., and Vernon Jordan ... Initially the UNCF seemed to be a perfect example of black agency: an organization started by blacks on behalf of black institutions. The real story is considerably more complicated." Book jacket.