In honor of Black History Month, we are reflecting on the extraordinary and deeply influential life of Franklin Thomas, founding leader of Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corp—the country’s first CDC—the first Black man to head the Ford Foundation, and the original architect of LISC. His dedication to helping revitalize neighborhoods by putting people and communities front and center shaped our field and the places we call home today.
Franklin A. Thomas was born during the Great Depression, the sixth child of working-class parents, immigrants from Antigua and Barbados who’d settled in Brooklyn’s sprawling Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. There, his mother and older sisters raised him, his mom working as a housekeeper, waitress, and, during World War II, a lathe operator. “I grew up,” he told the New York Times in 1982, “in a family that just assumed that one, you were smart and capable; two, that you were going to work hard; and three, the combination of these meant anything was possible.”
Thomas, who died in December 2021 at the age of 87, spent a lifetime expanding possibilities in communities like the one that shaped him.
He had enormous impact on the field of community development in America, helping to forge its basic infrastructure and articulate its underlying values. Thomas headed the nation’s first community development corporation (CDC), the Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, in the 1960s and ‘70s. As the newly appointed president and CEO of the Ford Foundation in 1979, he greenlighted a major Ford project to develop an “intermediary” organization that could support a network of community-based outfits like Restoration all across the country—the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC).
Thomas was by all accounts a gifted leader, astute in the dynamics of power but keenly focused on people—and on getting the job done. In a recent tribute, Colvin Grannum, who has helmed Restoration for two decades and sits on LISC’s board of directors, reflected on the many strands of Thomas’s influence: “Frank was Bed-Stuy’s statesman to the world.” While at Ford, Thomas launched the South Africa office and was a close ally of the anti-apartheid movement and Nelson Mandela. But he was also a role model to countless young Black New Yorkers who rarely saw their potentials embodied. When Grannum was in high school, he wrote, “Frank’s still-unfolding career opened my eyes to what might be possible for me, especially his story as an outstanding student athlete who had become a successful lawyer and returned to Bed-Stuy.”
Michael Rubinger, LISC’s CEO from 1999 to 2016, first met Thomas in the early ‘70s when Rubinger was a young Ford Foundation program officer whose portfolio included Restoration. Thomas “was not to be trifled with,” Rubinger recalls, “and he gave you that impression the moment you met him. He was a nice man, and very pleasant, but there was just something about him that said, ‘Look, I’m a serious guy.’ He was a presence.”
Denise Scott, LISC’s current president, also encountered Thomas early in her career. It was the ‘90s and she was working on establishing an Empowerment Zone in New York City, based on new federal legislation to spur investment in high-poverty neighborhoods. Thomas, then Ford’s chief, helped create a program at Columbia University to advise and support the initiative. Scott saw Thomas as “a giant” who brought a quiet rigor to the field; he knew an award could go only so far without a sound methodology to leverage resources, devise strategies and metrics of success, and scale up. “It was really about testing this theory of change,” she says.
Building a model in Bed-Stuy
Nearly three decades earlier, when Thomas, at age 33, returned to Bed-Stuy to lead Restoration’s pathbreaking revitalization efforts, he’d shown he could connect disparate social worlds, with concrete results.
As a teenager, on his mother’s advice, Thomas turned down athletic scholarships to take an academic scholarship at Columbia University, where he nonetheless became a basketball star, the first Black captain of an Ivy League team, a league MVP two years in a row, and the only Black person on his team—whose rebounding record still stands, 60-plus years later. He went on to join the Air Force, traveling the world as a navigator on an aerial tanker. After graduating from Columbia Law School in 1963, Thomas worked as a lawyer in the Federal Housing and Home Finance Agency (forerunner of HUD), then earned a coveted spot as assistant U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York, where he helped win conviction of domestic terrorists plotting to blow up the Statue of Liberty.
Bedford-Stuyvesant in the late ‘60s was a city of its own, home to some 400,000 people whose life conditions had deteriorated sharply, as a result of redlining, severe disinvestment and municipal neglect. In early 1966 Senator Robert F. Kennedy toured the neighborhood and heard from local activists who were sick and tired of being studied—“the writers of sociology books have milked us of all the information,” as one said—and wanted action.
By year’s end, Kennedy and his staff, after consulting far and wide, had an idea for a different kind of anti-poverty program, one that would be locally developed and led, but draw resources from private industry and philanthropy in addition to all levels of government. Bed-Stuy would be a testing ground for this model. And Kennedy courted Thomas to take the lead.
Thomas hesitated. He was concerned about the structure of the proposed program, consisting of two separate corporations and boards, one made up of Bed-Stuy community leaders who were to plan and lead neighborhood development and programs, the other of heavy-hitting corporate leaders including the heads of CBS and IBM, who were to raise funds and provide advice. One board was all Black, the other all white. Thomas, who was being recruited for top executive of the community corporation, felt that to be successful he needed both say-so and accountability, along with full access to both boards. He was also troubled by the intensely bitter dispute that broke out in Bed-Stuy over which constituencies would represent the neighborhood on this board that would finally, residents hoped, bring real opportunity.
After Thomas agreed to take the position in May 1967, one community leader, head of the Mid-Brooklyn Independent League, told the press, “It would be my guess that nobody who sincerely wants the job done could quibble with Thomas.” In 1974, the two corporations merged into one with Thomas as its head, reporting to both boards directly.
During Thomas’s decade-long tenure at Restoration, the organization did all the things that are now considered integral to comprehensive community development. It developed a $6 million commercial complex, Restoration Plaza. It brought in an IBM computer cable plant. It helped establish small local businesses, created thousands of jobs, and trained local people in carpentry, secretarial work, and appliance repair. It produced hundreds of units of affordable housing and created a multi-million-dollar mortgage-assistance program for would-be homeowners. It founded the Billie Holiday Theatre, billed today as “a beacon for world class art rooted in racial justice in the heart of Bed-Stuy.”
Thomas understood that all these efforts had to be rooted in community and the desires of local people to succeed: against the advice of those who wanted to see large-scale, top-down development as a first step, he insisted on launching his work at Restoration with a very simple repair and cleanup program, led by Bed-Stuy residents.
Thomas explained: “If you come out of a posture where in May you’re about to shoot each other on sight in this community—nobody had any reason to believe in anybody out here—and by July you’ve got two hundred people from this community at work improving it—[even] if they’re just trimming trees—[that] is the best testimony you’re ever going to get that there’s a serious effort afoot here.”
Achieving scale and legacy
While Thomas had an instinct for how to spark a single community’s sense of hope, efficacy, and cohesion, he also understood the need to marshal large-scale resources to experiment and seed efforts not just in Bed-Stuy, but across the country.
These were goals he would advance as president and CEO of the Ford Foundation, a position he won in 1979 from a field of 300 candidates (and accepted after turning down a potential appointment as Jimmy Carter’s HUD secretary in 1976).
Thomas was the first Black person to lead what had long been the nation’s richest and most influential philanthropy. He arrived a time when the foundation was badly overextended, its endowment battered in a market downdraft. Thomas “saved us from insolvency,” writes Ford’s current president, Darren Walker. He tightened the foundation’s grantmaking focus, prioritizing urban and rural poverty, and painfully trimmed its staff.
The blueprint for LISC was already on the table when Thomas came to Ford. But its principal architect, Ford vice president for national affairs Mitchell Sviridoff, credited Thomas with the core idea: to address urban poverty and disinvestment by finding 50 to 100 able groups like Restoration around the country, and supporting them as robustly as possible. “I don’t think Mike [Sviridoff] would have been able to sell this the way he did without Frank at the head of the Ford Foundation,” says Rubinger. “This was a big deal. Ford committed $10 million to LISC—that was a huge grant in 1979.”
Of course, today there are nearly five thousand CDCs serving neighborhoods and rural areas across the country. One of LISC’s legacies is some 40,000 units of affordable housing across the city that Thomas called home, created from property that at one point was drastically devalued—and that many insisted should be turned over to private hands to develop at their discretion.
Says Scott, “But for that intervention that built the capacity of the not-for-profits, that helped them to acquire and own property that was built to be affordable in many neighborhoods—in Harlem, in Bed-Stuy, parts of the Bronx—poor families wouldn't have a place to live in this city.”
In 2017, the nonprofit HistoryMakers hosted “An Evening with Franklin Thomas” in which friends and colleagues talked about his accomplishments, including but by no means limited to his role in community development. At its conclusion, Thomas offered a few words of his trademark wisdom.
“We have a wonderful nation that continues to improve itself. And we need to not let anyone or any group start to separate us again,” he said. “We need to stick together and we’ll all be stronger. We’ll have something that we can leave for those who follow us, that’s worthy of the efforts we all put in and the respect we have for the intention of the nation to be even greater than it’s been.”