“If I’m remembered 100 years from now, I hope it will be not for looks but for books.” – Ms. Dolly Parton
Every homecoming, a knot of alumni takes the same walk back onto campus past the same block, the same porches, the same children playing in yards a few hundred feet from the gates they once walked through themselves. Most years they don’t really see them. They’re thinking about the game, the cookout, the faces they haven’t seen since spring. But those children live only steps from the campus that shaped them, closer than any of them ever stopped to notice while they were students there. Their future and the institution’s are already tangled together whether anyone admits it or not. Some of them will never walk through those gates themselves — not for lack of promise, but because no one made sure they could read well before they turned six, and by the time it shows up as a problem, everyone treats it as someone else’s failure to fix. A fence line, or sometimes just a street, is all that separates the campus that made them from the community raising the children who could be next. This year, walking that same route, one of them finally says it out loud. By Monday, the group has pulled the zip code. It’s already moving through the group chat; who’s in, who’s giving what, who’s setting up the recurring charge tonight. Each of them commits to a standing monthly gift, on their own, no chapter paperwork needed. By next year’s homecoming, they’re not just showing up, they’re telling everyone else in that same group chat’s orbit to do the same.
That is the structural story hiding inside a straightforward piece of philanthropic news. On August 25, Dolly Parton died at 80 after a battle with cancer, and within hours her Imagination Library, the nonprofit that has mailed more than 300 million free books to children from birth to age five since 1995, pledged to continue operating without her. It has strong reason to reassure the public. In the months before her death, Indiana and Missouri, two of the program’s largest state partners, cut a combined $10 million in public funding, and the effects were immediate: Missouri froze new enrollment on July 1 after lawmakers cut its allocation from roughly $6 million to $2 million, and Indiana dropped a $6 million two-year commitment that had reached more than 152,000 children, about 37 percent of the state’s under-five population, leaving a private fundraising campaign to close the gap.
It is worth being precise about why this particular loss registers differently across Black America than the death of most entertainers would. Parton’s standing in Black communities was not incidental goodwill; it was built through specific, repeated decisions over four decades. When Whitney Houston’s 1992 cover of “I Will Always Love You” generated an estimated $10 million in royalties for Parton, she used part of that windfall to purchase a commercial complex in a predominantly Black Nashville neighborhood, a property she later called, in her own words, “the house that Whitney built.” She was among the first public figures to advocate openly for people living with HIV and AIDS in the 1980s, when the subject carried real professional risk. In 2020 she voiced unambiguous support for the principle behind Black Lives Matter, and that same year donated $1 million to Vanderbilt University Medical Center toward coronavirus research that fed into the Moderna vaccine, a contribution not framed as racial-justice philanthropy but one that mattered disproportionately to Black communities carrying a disproportionate share of COVID-19’s toll. When Beyoncé reworked “Jolene” on Cowboy Carter in 2024, Parton publicly welcomed it rather than guarding the song as untouchable. Her death drew tributes from Black cultural and political figures across generations, including the nation’s first Black president. None of that history makes the Imagination Library a Black institution, and this publication has no interest in overstating it. But it explains why the erosion of one of her signature programs is being felt in Black America as something closer to institutional loss than celebrity news and why the ecosystem she consistently, unsentimentally invested in is well positioned to be the one that protects what she built.
The Imagination Library’s funding architecture is worth understanding before arguing that HBCU alumni should engage with it. The Dollywood Foundation covers national administrative overhead; local partners; usually a nonprofit, library system, or community foundation, fund the actual books and postage for their coverage area; and in many states, a public appropriation matches what the local partner raises, typically on a fifty-fifty basis. This is a genuinely decentralized model, closer in structure to a franchise network than a single national charity, and it is precisely because of that structure that state-level political decisions can gut service in one place while leaving it untouched in another. Missouri’s cut is the sharper illustration: in 2024 the state became the first in the country to fully fund the program, delivering 1.9 million books in a single year, and this year’s reduction converted a national model program into a waitlist. Indiana’s cut removed the largest state contribution the program had, and while the governor’s wife has since run a private campaign that had reached roughly 90 percent of its two-year replacement goal by March, the shortfall illustrates a pattern this publication has tracked in other contexts: public commitments to Black and working-class communities are frequently the first line item removed when budgets tighten, and private philanthropy is expected to backfill on short notice with no guarantee of permanence.
This is where the moral case for giving; that literacy is good, that children deserve books, that Parton’s legacy is worth honoring should give way to a structural case, because the moral case, while true, does nothing to explain why HBCU alumni specifically should act, or why they should act through this program rather than any other worthy cause competing for the same dollar. The structural case is that early childhood reading proficiency is the first stage of the same talent pipeline that HBCU admissions offices, endowments, and surrounding local economies depend on decades later. The Annie E. Casey Foundation has found that students who are not reading proficiently by the end of third grade are four times more likely to leave high school without a diploma than proficient readers, and shared reading in the earliest years has been identified in the pediatric research literature as one of the most effective levers for building the school-readiness skills that predict later outcomes. Every child in a majority-Black zip code who fails to reach third-grade proficiency is a young person the institutional ecosystem has effectively lost before that child ever applies anywhere; not lost to a rival university, but lost to a structural gap that formed a decade earlier and was never someone’s assigned responsibility to close. HBCUs sit inside this pipeline whether their leadership treats it that way or not. A campus’s long-run enrollment base, its local labor pool, its alumni base twenty years out, and the tax and consumer base of the surrounding Black community are not separable from the reading outcomes of five-year-olds currently living within a few miles of the quad.
Framed this way, the Imagination Library’s donation mechanics stop being incidental and start being a genuine instrument of capital retention. The donation platform allows a donor to designate a gift to a specific Local Program Partner, either by selecting one directly or by entering a zip code or postal code, which routes the contribution to the affiliate serving that address rather than into an undifferentiated national pool. An alumnus of Fisk can direct dollars into Nashville. An alumnus of Grambling State can direct dollars into Lincoln Parish. An alumnus of Alcorn State, Fort Valley State, or Cheyney can direct dollars into Lorman, Fort Valley, or the Brandywine Valley rather than into whichever state happens to have the most visible fundraising campaign that year. This matters because the HBCU ecosystem’s chronic capital-retention problem is not only about tuition dollars or philanthropic gifts leaving the ecosystem for PWIs it is also about diffuse, well-intentioned giving that never lands in the specific towns and neighborhoods that make up the extended HBCU footprint. A general donation to a national children’s literacy charity is a fine act of citizenship. A designated donation, tied to the zip code of one’s own institution and repeated as a recurring monthly gift, is an act of institutional infrastructure-building indistinguishable in kind, if not in scale, from an endowment gift or a scholarship fund. It should be treated by advancement offices the same way: as a designated giving category, marketed alongside scholarships and building funds, not left to individual alumni to discover on their own.
Before any of this can be marketed with confidence, it needs verification, because the network’s coverage is uneven by design. Not every zip code has an active Local Program Partner (check with Imagination Library), and a well-intentioned designated gift to an HBCU’s host community will simply fail to route if no affiliate exists there yet. Alumni associations and institutional advancement offices should check availability for their specific campus community before building a giving campaign around it, and where no local affiliate exists, the more consequential action may be organizing one; approaching a local library system, community foundation, or the institution itself about becoming a Local Program Partner, which would let the university’s home community capture matching state or philanthropic dollars rather than simply mailing checks into someone else’s affiliate. That is a heavier lift than a donation button, but it is the difference between renting a spot in someone else’s infrastructure and building a permanent piece of one’s own, a distinction the HBCU ecosystem has learned to care about in banking, in real estate, and in research capacity, and should extend to children’s literacy as well.
There is a natural, if imperfect, partner already sitting inside the ecosystem for this work: the HBCU Library Alliance, a membership consortium of HBCU academic libraries built around preserving Black historical and cultural collections, developing library leadership, and building digital archives, with active Mellon Foundation support for financial capacity-building and NEH backing for humanities collections work. Its formal mandate is academic library infrastructure, not early-childhood book distribution, and this publication has been consistently corrected on the danger of assigning capabilities to institutions that do not actually have them so it would be inaccurate to describe the Alliance as an operator of childhood literacy programs or a grantor with authority over Imagination Library funding decisions. What it plausibly can do, sitting where it does inside the ecosystem, is convene. Its member libraries are physically embedded in or near the same host communities alumni would be donating into, and a consortium built around expanding access to books and preserving Black intellectual life is a natural venue for publicizing zip-code-designated giving campaigns to alumni networks, tracking which member institutions’ communities have active local affiliates and which have coverage gaps, and lending its existing credibility with member library directors to conversations with local governments and foundations about establishing new affiliates in underserved HBCU towns. None of that requires new statutory authority or grant capacity the Alliance does not have. It requires treating the organization as what it already is: a coordination point for the library infrastructure of the HBCU ecosystem, extended one step further to include the earliest readers who will eventually walk into those same libraries as students.
The broader pattern here is not new, even if the specific instance is. Public commitments to reading infrastructure in under-resourced and disproportionately Black communities have proven, across states and across administrations, to be among the more fragile line items in a state budget — vulnerable to a single legislative session in a way that private, community-anchored infrastructure is not. Books and reading are not merely contested terrain nationally; they are an active battlefield, fought out in school and library book removals, in funding fights over public library systems, and now in the quiet defunding of a program that puts a single free book in a child’s hands each month. The casualties of that fight are not abstract. A child who does not encounter books in the first five years of life does not get those years reissued at eight or twelve; the window for building early reading skill closes on a biological, not a legislative, schedule, and every budget cycle that treats early literacy funding as negotiable is making that closure permanent for some number of real children, disproportionately in the communities already carrying the least institutional cushion to absorb it. The lesson the HBCU ecosystem has already learned from its own experience with federal and state funding volatility that institutions dependent entirely on public appropriation are institutions one legislative session away from crisis applies with equal force here. The strategic response is the same in both cases: build parallel, community-owned capacity that does not evaporate when a state’s budget priorities shift.
None of this requires alumni to feel sentimental to justify participating, even if the sentiment is real and, in this case, well earned. It requires recognizing that a five-year-old in Lorman, Daytona Beach, or Dover who receives a free book every month for five years is a more literate ten-year-old, a more prepared seventeen-year-old, and, a decade or two on, a more plausible applicant, employee, or neighbor of the institution down the road and that the zip code field on a donation form is, in this narrow but real sense, an instrument of institutional strategy. The Imagination Library will likely survive the loss of its founder; whether the specific communities that surround Black colleges and universities keep receiving it is a separate question, one that now depends on whether the institutions with the clearest long-run interest in the answer choose to treat it as their responsibility.
There is also a simpler way to say all of this. Dolly Parton spent four decades showing up for Black America without asking anything of it in return and not always loudly, rarely as spectacle, usually in the form of money quietly redirected toward a Black neighborhood, a vaccine trial, an artist reworking her song, a stance taken when it would have been easier not to. The obligation that creates is not sentimental; it is the same obligation that governs any relationship built on reciprocity rather than charity. An institution she built and unsentimentally invested in is now vulnerable and not only in Indiana and Missouri, but as one casualty inside a far broader, ongoing national contest over whether children retain unencumbered access to books at all, playing out simultaneously in book removals from school and library shelves and in funding fights over public library systems nationwide. She never framed that fight as her own. But a free book mailed to a five-year-old every month for five years was always, structurally, a stake in it. Showing up for that institution the way she showed up for Black America; consistently, structurally, without waiting to be asked twice is simply the other half of the exchange she started. That is what protecting her legacy actually looks like: not a tribute, but a continuation.
How to do this, starting today:
- Get your HBCU’s zip code. Not your alma mater’s mailing address — the zip code of the actual community around the campus, where the children you’d be reaching live.
- Confirm a Local Program Partner is active there. Go to imaginationlibrary.com/check-availability and enter the zip code before donating. Coverage isn’t universal — some HBCU communities don’t have an affiliate yet, which is its own problem worth knowing about.
- Go to donate.imaginationlibrary.com and designate your gift. Select your country, check the box to designate the donation to a specific Local Program Partner, and enter the zip code so it routes to that community rather than into the general fund.
- Set it to recur monthly, not once. A one-time gift helps a handful of children for a few months. A standing monthly gift is what keeps a child enrolled from birth through age five — pick an amount you can sustain, not one that feels good today and stops in March.
- Pull someone else in before you close the tab. Text the group chat, post it to your chapter’s page, bring the zip code to next year’s homecoming. This works at scale only if it becomes a habit alumni pass to each other, not an individual good deed.
- If there’s no local partner yet, say so out loud. Flag it to your alumni association or your institution’s advancement office. A missing affiliate in an HBCU’s own community is a gap someone with standing needs to raise with a local library system or community foundation — not just wait out.
Disclaimer: This article was assisted by ClaudeAI.
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