“My friends thought I was crazy,” C. Payne Lucas recalled of his efforts in the early 1970s to start a nonprofit organization in the United States to provide aid in Africa. “People used to say: ‘C. Payne, this is a stupid idea. You aren’t going to get black Americans to give you any money. They’re too tied up trying to get things accomplished here.’ ”

The logic was hard to fault. Racial tension, discrimination and economic inequality were everywhere in the United States, and the anger of the 1960s was still very much in evidence. In 1971 there were riots in Bridgeport, Conn.; Camden, N.J.; Chattanooga, Tenn.; and elsewhere.

Yet that very year, Mr. Lucas and several others started Africare, with the initial hope that at least some of its support would come from black Americans. And, especially once this fledgling organization began publicizing the effects of drought in the Sahel region of north-central Africa, it did.

“Suddenly all these people started coming in with contributions, most of them from the inner city,” Mr. Lucas recalled in a 1984 interview with The New York Times. “We had welfare mothers coming in with bags of change.”