Billionaire couple gives Spelman College largest-ever single donation to an HBCU
A billionaire couple is giving $100m to Atlanta’s Spelman College, which the women’s school says is the largest-ever single donation to a historically Black college or university (HBCU).
The donation was announced on Thursday by Ronda Stryker and her husband William Johnston. She is the billionaire granddaughter of the founder of the medical device maker Stryker
Corp and he is the chairman of the money management firm Greenleaf Trust. They live in Michigan.
Spelman said that it would use $75m to endow scholarships. The rest of the money will be used for other purposes, including developing an academic focus on public policy and democracy and improving student housing, a sore point in recent years among Spelman students.
“It’s a transformational gift to any institution, period,” trustee Lovette Russell said.
HBCUs have small endowments compared with other colleges, but have seen an increase in donations since the racial justice protests spurred by the killing of George Floyd in Minnesota in 2020. Spelman, which has about 2,400 students, has been relatively wellfunded, though, reporting an endowment of $571m in 2021. It’s one of only two historically Black women’s colleges and part of the Atlanta University Center, a consortium of four historically Black schools.
“I think it says that it’s worth investing in HBCUs more broadly, schools that have been far too underinvested in,” said Helene Gayle, Spelman College president, to CBS News. The college announced the donation Thursday in its chapel on a CBS broadcast.
Stryker has been a Spelman trustee since 1997. She and Johnston gave Spelman $30m in 2018. They also gave $100m in 2011 to create the Homer Stryker medical school at Western Michigan University.
The Spelman donation comes a week after the United Negro College Fund announced a donation of $100m from the Lilly Endowment Inc. That