The Mellon Foundation Never Met a Left-Wing Grievance Group It Didn’t Like
January 2026
The Mellon Foundation has a fascination with ‘marginalized communities’ (leftspeak, to be sure). Merriam Webster defines the word as “having marginal social or political status : relegated to an unimportant or powerless position within a society or group.”
In the past, the Mellon Foundation’s mission was to fund the humanities, or, the good, the true, and the beautiful. Does Mellon care about what the art they fund looks like anymore, or just what the artists themselves look like? It is obvious that their current focus is, without a doubt, on what the artists look like, and, more importantly, leftist ideology and grievance politics.
Let’s explore some examples of the marginalized whom Mellon Trustees and higher-ups choose to provide grants for.
Conclusion
One “marginalized” effort the Mellon Foundation’s Monuments Project program DECLINED to support in 2023 is Maurice Barboza’s mission to honor black Revolutionary War patriots with a beautiful monument on the Washington, D.C. Mall. Barboza, the founder of the National Mall Liberty Fund D.C., whose ancestors fought in the war, has been working for over 40 years to see his project come to fruition.
It should behoove any patriotic American, who cherishes our nation’s history, to try and make sense out of the fact that a philanthropic humanities organization that prides itself on monument building, especially monuments honoring the “marginalized,” refused the opportunity to help Mr. Barboza honor those who, at the time, fought for freedom for a nation that had not granted them the same.
But, then again, Mellon is not one to celebrate liberty-loving Americans, regardless of race, ethnicity, sexual proclivity, or marginalized status. It seems, one must check the “I hate America” box in order to be considered for a “marginalized” Mellon grant.
January 2026
- Today’s Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, evidently, hasn’t met many so-called “marginalized” groups they’ve declined to support. We do know of one, however, they have refused a grant for, that will be mentioned at the conclusion of this article.
The Mellon Foundation has a fascination with ‘marginalized communities’ (leftspeak, to be sure). Merriam Webster defines the word as “having marginal social or political status : relegated to an unimportant or powerless position within a society or group.”
In the past, the Mellon Foundation’s mission was to fund the humanities, or, the good, the true, and the beautiful. Does Mellon care about what the art they fund looks like anymore, or just what the artists themselves look like? It is obvious that their current focus is, without a doubt, on what the artists look like, and, more importantly, leftist ideology and grievance politics.
Let’s explore some examples of the marginalized whom Mellon Trustees and higher-ups choose to provide grants for.
- Saleem Hue Penny, a poet and one of the Disability Futures Fellows, who “writes for young people of color who are navigating wild spaces,” stresses that everyone should read and endeavor to embody the 10 principles of “Disability Justice” during Disability Pride Month (July, 2025). Essentially, what he is implying is that the principles of hating capitalism, rejecting white supremacy and the heteropatriarchy, etc., will “accomplish the revolution we require.” But isn’t this supposed to be about creating and promoting art?
- A (2025) $2.35 million grant from Mellon to the Tlingit & Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska will fund projects ensuring native voices will be part of the landscape at the Mendenhall Glacier Recreation Area. Ralph Wolfe, Director of Tlingit & Haida’s Indigenous Stewardship Program, said, “Thanks to the Mellon Foundation, we’re able to carry out work that centers our stories, our language, and our relationship with the land.” Then, Wolfe said the quiet part out loud: “This partnership is about healing past injustices….”
- New York City’s only STEM-based and tuition-free music program, Willie Mae Rock Camp, received a $500,000 Mellon grant in 2024. This program is exclusively reserved for girls and gender-expansive youth from “marginalized backgrounds.”
- The New Directions Fellowships “assist faculty members in the humanities and humanistic social sciences who seek to acquire systematic training outside their own areas of special interest.”
- One recipient, Howard University Professor Amy Yeboah Quarkume, was selected to study and confront racial bias in data mining (2021-2023). Dr. Quarkume is a self-described “trained humanist in Africana Studies.” She’s looking for ‘data deserts’ in marginalized communities with her “What’s Up With All That Bias” project.
- Dr. Quarkume concludes that black, brown, and native American or indigenous populations are missing from the datasets used to make life-and-death decisions. Dr. Quarkume says these populations are “exposed to more environmental, weather, and health-related harm than their white counterparts” and are left to deal with the effects of environmental racism. The project calls this environmental racism, the “new Jim Crow.”
- Dr. Quarkume is advancing Howard University’s “first major effort in becoming a hub for data science social justice research” by combining the fields of data science and artificial intelligence to confront bias and uplift realities of marginalized peoples.
- The University of Tulsa has received a (2025) $677,000 Mellon Foundation Public Knowledge grant to support a joint effort between the university and the Muscogee (Creek) Nation’s Historic and Cultural Preservation Department. Midge Dellinger, oral historian for the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, says, “Sacred and treasured tribal historical and cultural materials are still confined within the settler-controlled archival spaces of the United States, leaving Indigenous people to seek what rightfully belongs to them…This project aspires to change this centuries-long norm of such acts against Indigenous peoples….”
- One of our Guardians of History colleague puts this particular project into perspective: “If Mellon feels so strongly about settler-controlled land, perhaps they should lead by example and forfeit any land owned by the foundation to whichever Indian tribe was the last to conquer the land from their fellow Indian neighbors.”
- A Mellon (2025) grant will support the launch of the Indigenous Humanities Lab at Virginia Commonwealth University which will create collaboration between VCU scholars, students, and Virginia's tribal nations. Just for the record, Virginia Commonwealth University has issued a “land acknowledgement” claiming the VCU Health System lives and works on the “traditional lands of the Powhatan Chiefdom and the Monacan Nation, their ancestors, and future generations.” As if a land acknowledgement were not enough to show the exercise definitely tilts to left, given that the co-director is a self-described ‘queer Mexican feminist’.
- Prospect Park Alliance has received a $1.5 million Humanities in Place grant from the Mellon Foundation to create new outdoor exhibits for Lefferts Historic House Museum as part of the Alliance’s Reimagine Lefferts Initiative (2023). The “Reimagine Lefferts” initiative project will highlight the narratives of the Indigenous people of Lenapehoking, on whose unceded ancestral lands the house was built, and the Africans enslaved by the Lefferts family. Prospect Park Alliance President, Morgan Monaco, says that the initiative will “heal deep-seated wounds from our nation’s past.”
- The North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems was awarded ($150,000 in June 2022 and $3,100,000 in May 2024). The grants help NATIFS engage in food education, production, and distribution - to change the continent’s relationship to ingredients that are traditional to Indigenous cultures and histories. Chef Sean Sherman, Founder of NATIFS, speaks of the grant: “You’re moving money to Indigenous producers, for food that gets created by an Indigenous workforce, which then goes to the Indigenous [and other] communities that need it the most…” Owamni, Sherman’s restaurant in Minneapolis, “refrains from using ingredients introduced by European colonizers. That excludes wheat flour, cane sugar, dairy, beef, pork, and chicken from the menu.”
- The Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS) program of Montclair State University’s College of Humanities and Social Sciences has been awarded, in 2024, a three-year, $1 million grant from the Mellon Foundation to create a new center, the New Jersey Center for Indigenous Justice (NJCIJ), and to expand its programing. The Center’s commitment will be to Indigenous rights, racial justice, decolonization and eco-justice….
- In December of 2020, the Mellon Foundation granted the “Peace Development Fund” $1,330,000 “to support a multipronged effort to center the knowledge and languages of marginalized communities on the Internet.” PDF’s 2024 grantees include the social justice-oriented Seeding the Movement Fund, under which is listed the Marxist group, Black Lives Matter, of Denver, Colorado. In past years, PDF has awarded grants to the violent Students for Justice in Palestine.
- From Discover The Networks: PDF executive director Paul Haible states that “in order for true racial reconciliation to take place in the U.S., white Americans must acknowledge their own responsibility for the past and present suffering of nonwhites: “If we don’t deal with that original discord in our nation, what happened to the original people here, we can never get to a place of peace.”
Conclusion
One “marginalized” effort the Mellon Foundation’s Monuments Project program DECLINED to support in 2023 is Maurice Barboza’s mission to honor black Revolutionary War patriots with a beautiful monument on the Washington, D.C. Mall. Barboza, the founder of the National Mall Liberty Fund D.C., whose ancestors fought in the war, has been working for over 40 years to see his project come to fruition.
It should behoove any patriotic American, who cherishes our nation’s history, to try and make sense out of the fact that a philanthropic humanities organization that prides itself on monument building, especially monuments honoring the “marginalized,” refused the opportunity to help Mr. Barboza honor those who, at the time, fought for freedom for a nation that had not granted them the same.
But, then again, Mellon is not one to celebrate liberty-loving Americans, regardless of race, ethnicity, sexual proclivity, or marginalized status. It seems, one must check the “I hate America” box in order to be considered for a “marginalized” Mellon grant.