Among the movement’s biggest funders were Stephen and Audrey Currier, forgotten figures today, but perhaps the richest and most glamorous liberals of their time. (They both died in a plane crash in 1967.) Stephen was the stepson of Edward Warburg of the Kuhn, Loeb banking family, while Audrey was the granddaughter of Andrew Mellon and an heiress to one of the largest fortunes in the United States. The couple established the Taconic Foundation, which gave generously to civil rights causes. Stephen Currier organized a famous New York fundraising event in 1963 that brought in $800,000 from other wealthy donors and foundations.

The Curriers were important funders of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and Freedom Summer, the 1964 push to increase voter registration. Other wealthy liberals, such as Philip Stern of the Stern Family Fund, also channeled serious money to civil rights organizations in the 1960s. Stern was a big investor in the the Voter Education Project, a collaborative fund set up in 1962 that channeled money from Stern and several other foundations, including Taconic, to civil rights groups battling for the right to vote in southern states.

But even earlier, philanthropy played a key role in putting race on the national agenda and achieving initial civil rights victories. Carnegie money bankrolled the famous study on race relations in the U.S. by Swedish social scientist Gunnar Mydral, published in 1944 under the title An American Dilemma. In turn, as an NCRP paper last year by Sean Dobson pointed out, that study played a "pivotal role in establishing the groundwork for the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education by identifying the problems of racial inequity as structured by white privilege to keep African Americans in disadvantaged positions and denying them the opportunities needed to achieve the American dream."

Philanthropists also supported the long and expensive litigation battle that culminated in the Brown victory. The Field Foundation, established by a department store heir, supported the NAACP Legal Defense Fund which spearheaded the case, and went on to become the LDF's single biggest backer. Field was also a primary backer of the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, which trained many civil rights organizers, starting in the 1950s, including top SNCC leaders like John Lewis. (When Lewis left SNCC, his first job was at the Field Foundation.)

The New World Foundation—started by the heir to an industrial machinery fortune—was another key backer of civil rights organizations. Like Field, NWF was an early backer of the LDF and, according to Dobson's paper, helped start the LDF's internship program that would become a breeding ground for talented young civil rights attorneys, including Marian Wright Edelman.