Brothers Donate $5M to Honor Black Couple Who Helped Family

In the late 1930s, a man born into slavery in Kentucky rented a house in Coronado, California, to a Chinese American family excluded from other properties under racist laws. That property is now worth some serious coin, and the family is paying it back with a $5 million gift to the Black community. Ron Dong and Lloyd Dong Jr., sons of Lloyd Dong, made a donation to San Diego State University's Black Resource Center to honor Gus and Emma Thompson, NBC News reports. The Dongs rented the home for 17 years before buying it in 1955 under a long-standing agreement with the Thompsons. They replaced a barn on the property with an apartment complex and the brothers, who have no children and live elsewhere in California, are donating their share of the proceeds from the sale of both properties.

Ron, 86, and Lloyd Jr., 82, say the offer from the Thompsons was the break their family needed, per SDSU. They say Gus Thompson also helped their father expand his gardening business and was long known as a champion of people of color in Coronado, and later across the bay in San Diego. Thompson moved from Kentucky to California to work at the Hotel del Coronado. He was able to rent property to the Chinese family because he built the house and barn in 1895, before racial housing covenants came into effect, NBC reports. Local historian Kevin Ashley tells the Coronado Times that for many years, a boarding house in the upper part of Thompson's barn was the only place Black people doing seasonal work in Coronado could stay.

In the 1930s, it wasn't unusual for people affected by racist laws to support each other, says Howard University political science professor Jo Von McCalester. "It was just something understood that marginalized people in San Diego had to rely very heavily on one another." SDSU professor Tonika Green says the gift will "change lives" by helping more students graduate and advance their careers. "When you look at all the things that Gus Thompson did, he did a lot of things for a lot of other people, things that they might otherwise could never have done themselves," Ron Dong says. "We wanted to do something to repay him, to give back." (More uplifting news stories.)