Textile Heiress Seeks to Reward Service to Others Through Scholarships
By Caroline Preston
Contributor
March 3, 2005 | Read Time: 6 minutes
Mignon C. Smith, a member of a wealthy textile-manufacturing family from Alabama, says she wants to bring
back integrity and civic-mindedness to public life. To that end, she has designated the bulk of her fortune for scholarships to students in her home state who may not stand out academically but have a record of service to their families and communities.
“It’s wonderful to have academic achievers, but I’m much more interested in helping people who are good citizens,” says Ms. Smith, whose great-grandfather was an Alabama governor who founded the textile company Avondale Mills.
Ms. Smith, who turned 74 last month, never married and has no children of her own. Last year, she gave $10-million to set up the J. Craig and Page T. Smith Foundation, in honor of her parents. She also set up a trust with an additional $30-million that will go into the foundation after her death.
The foundation will award scholarships of up to $15,000 each to 10 to 15 students this year.
Parents’ Legacy
The foundation, says Ms. Smith, is meant to honor her parents’ philanthropic work. Her father, who was president of the
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textile company, paid for the daughters of mill workers to attend college, in an era when few girls could receive scholarships, she says.
When Ms. Smith’s stock in SouthTrust skyrocketed last year after the company’s merger with Wachovia Bank, she decided the time was right to continue her parents’ “legacy of learning.”
The scholarships are intended for young people who are too busy holding down a job, taking care of a sick relative, or helping needy people in their neighborhoods to have the time needed to earn the kind of grades that most other scholarship programs require. Students with a C average or higher can qualify.
Students who are the first in their families to attend college will receive special consideration, says Ahrian Davis Tyler, a lawyer in Birmingham tapped to administer the foundation. She would have fallen into that category herself, she says, if her mother had not enrolled in college when Ms. Tyler was attending high school.
“We’re hoping not to change just one life with this; we’re hoping to change whole families’ lives,” says Ms. Tyler, noting that university graduates are much more likely than other parents to encourage their own children and others they know to pursue higher education.
Ms. Smith says she also worries that Alabama’s economy, based on industries like the one in which her family made its fortune, can no longer compete. Rather than training people for specific skills that will surely become obsolete, she says, students need a broader education. “We shouldn’t be just trying to hang on to the textile industry,” she says, “We need to join the world.”
Ms. Smith jokes that her father, the textile baron, “would probably be rolling over in his grave if he knew that his daughter was saying this, but I think he would be joining the world also.”
Apart from the scholarships, Ms. Smith pledged $5-million last year to establish a professorship in integrity in business at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa. She says she was inspired to do that in part as a result of research she conducted on her father for a biography that will appear this fall. Ms. Smith says she was struck by the difference in business culture during his time and today.
“My mother used to say, ‘Don’t tempt honest people by leaving money around,’ but it’s gone beyond that,” she remarks, expressing her dismay at stories of students’ cheating and of corporate scandals from the last few years. “I want to get the bad fish out of the barrel.”
Ms. Smith attended the University of Alabama, but she left before completing her degree. She says that after attending a boarding school in McLean, Va., for five years and receiving an associate’s degree from Briarcliff College, a now-defunct institution in New York, she was tired of taking classes just to fill requirements. “I knew then I didn’t want to be a walking encyclopedia,” she says.
She chose a career in journalism instead, motivated by her desire as a Republican to try to correct what she perceived as the slanted news coverage of the time.
In the early 1960s, Ms. Smith moved to Washington, D.C., where she has spent most of her time ever since, although she still has a residence in her home state. She got her first job covering Washington for an Alabama paper, The Daily Home, in Talladega, and later worked as a White House radio correspondent.
Today, her job is running a business, Mede Cahaba Stable & Stud, that trains, shows, and breeds horses. She has about 70 horses under her care, and managing them requires nearly all her time. Ms. Tyler says that even during their business meetings, Ms. Smith often dictates instructions to the handlers who take care of her horses.
One job Ms. Smith will not be participating in is the selection of the scholarship recipients. “I don’t want it to be political,” she says. A board of 12 trustees, which includes a diverse group of judges, lawyers, and teachers, will pick the scholarship winners.
Ms. Tyler acknowledges the difficulty in weeding out applicants who have dabbled in community service from those who have demonstrated a true commitment.
But already a few applications have stood out, she says, like the very first she received, from a girl who had helped rebuild the home of a local family, tutored the mother in the family in preparation for her high-school-equivalency exam, and enrolled the child in speech therapy.
Hundreds of Applications
By mid-February, the foundation had received more than 200 applications for the first round of scholarships and is expecting to receive double that number by the time the application period ends this week.
Ms. Smith says she had intended to make the gift quietly, but she hopes the attention it has attracted from news organizations will strengthen the quality of applicants and help level the playing field for students who are not academic stars but could make a big impact on the world around them.
“This is not a scholarship for slackers,” Ms. Tyler says. The “C” in “C average,” she adds, stands for “civic-minded, citizenship, and community.”
