Ex-wife of Bezos spreads wealth for racial equity

Shock. That’s what Ruth Simmons, president of a historically Black university in Texas, felt in December when she received a call informing her that the school would be given $50 million — many times the size of the previous largest contribution it has received.

Simmons, who leads Prairie View A&M University, thought she misheard the caller, so she asked for the amount to be repeated: “Five-Zero.”

The donor this time was MacKenzie Scott, who has reset the philanthropic agenda for racial equity while barely saying a word. Similar stories of surprise have flooded in from across the country in the past year as colleges and nonprofits received unexpected gifts from Scott and her husband, Dan Jewett.

Scott, a 51-year-old novelist, received the bulk of her fortune from her 2019 divorce from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. After the police killing of George Floyd, she funded the top recipients of racial equity donations in 27 states, according to an AP analysis of preliminary data from the philanthropy research organization Candid.

The data, which includes only contributions from institutional funders, shows that Scott was responsible for $567 million distributed to such organizations. (Two organizations declined to say how much they received from the philanthropist.)

In at least 11 states, Scott provided the majority of racial equity-oriented contributions to the top recipients. She was the sole major donor to these groups in 10 other states, with donations for education dominating her giving.

Scott’s impact in some states could be larger still, because it remains unclear how all of the $8.7 billion she has donated since 2020 has been distributed to individual organizations.