Princeton stayed silent. That’s the headline from Kwanza Jones this week — how she says the university ignored her outreach until she and her husband put $20 million on the table. But the Kwanza Jones Bennett College story is a different animal entirely. Long before she became baseball’s newest owner, Jones had already built a financial and family legacy at a tiny women’s HBCU in Greensboro, North Carolina — one with roughly 200 students and a lot of history.
Jones opened up about the Princeton experience on T.I.’s ExpediTIously podcast. She said she reached out more than once about funding a residential college. Nothing. “No one got back to me,” Jones said. “I asked again. Waited a few months. Asked again. Still, no one got back to me.” Eventually she and her husband, José E. Feliciano, wrote the check anyway — $20 million, in 2020, funding Princeton’s undergraduate expansion. Two dormitories now carry their names. When T.I. joked it took $20 million just to get a reply, Jones didn’t argue.
That story reignited a familiar question in HBCU circles: why give that kind of money to a wealthy Ivy League school instead of a Black college? The answer sits closer to home than most people realized.
Kwanza Jones has deep Bennett College roots
This didn’t start with a headline-grabbing check. It started with family. Jones’ mother, Dorothy Wilkerson Jones, graduated from Bennett in 1965. An aunt and other relatives went there too. That’s the part of her story that predates the money entirely.
Her support for Bennett has never been a one-off. She previously chaired the Bennett College Board of Trustees and now holds status as an honorary alumna — a title the school doesn’t hand out lightly. In 2019, she and Feliciano gave $1 million during the #StandWithBennett campaign, the emergency fundraising push that helped the college keep its accreditation after regulators threatened to pull it over financial instability. Bennett was genuinely at risk of closing. That gift landed during the fight to keep the doors open.
The giving didn’t stop there. In 2025, the couple made a $1.5 million commitment honoring outgoing Bennett President Suzanne Elise Walsh, timed to the 60th anniversary of Dorothy Jones’ graduation. “Bennett College has been shaping futures for generations,” Jones said at the time. “It’s not just any one of us—it’s a collective legacy; it’s all of us.” That gift covered scholarships, residence hall renovations, and plans for a new science center. By Bennett’s own accounting, the couple’s total giving to the school now tops $3 million — putting them among the school’s most consistent modern donors. HBCU Buzz has tracked that relationship for years in its ongoing Bennett College coverage.
Why the Princeton donation drew scrutiny
Jones is stepping into a much bigger spotlight now. She and Feliciano recently became the new owners of the San Diego Padres, a deal reportedly valued at $3.9 billion — the richest sale in MLB history. That makes Jones the first Black woman to hold majority ownership of a Major League Baseball franchise. Feliciano serves as the club’s MLB-designated control person. Their group holds roughly 45 percent of the team through personal investment. Given numbers that size, it’s easy to see why some assumed the Princeton gift meant her giving skipped over HBCUs altogether. It’s a reasonable assumption. It’s just not the right one.
Bennett has had Jones’ sustained attention for more than a decade — board leadership, scholarship money, campus upgrades, and a rescue gift during one of the school’s most dangerous financial stretches. Painting her as a donor who overlooks Black colleges just doesn’t hold up against that record.
None of this erases what the Princeton story reveals, though. Elite institutions really can overlook their most accomplished Black graduates, and Jones said as much herself — it took an eight-figure gift to get a simple response from her own alma mater. That frustration is real. It just doesn’t cancel out what she’s quietly built at Bennett.
A legacy that runs through family
Strip away the dollar figures, though, and the Kwanza Jones Bennett College relationship looks like something else entirely: three generations of women who chose the same small campus in Greensboro. It’s not a story that fits neatly into a press release. A 1965 graduation. An honorary alumna title. Years on the board. That’s a bond that predates the wealth and the fame by decades. HBCU Buzz’s HBCU philanthropy coverage has followed similar stories across the Black college community, where family ties often outlast any single campaign.
Jones is about to help run a baseball franchise worth billions. Even so, her Bennett ties tell you more about how she’s actually spent her money than the Princeton headline does. She gave generously to Princeton — no question. But she also gave generously, and repeatedly, to the HBCU that shaped generations of her own family, long before anyone was writing headlines about it. Bennett still leans on donors like her as it works to rebuild enrollment after years of financial strain, in a stretch when a lot of small private HBCUs have had to fight just to stay open. In that sense, the Kwanza Jones Bennett College chapter may say more about who she actually is than the one about Princeton ever will.
