His Favorite Color

Roughly ten years before Prince died, the activist Van Jones received a $50,000 donation with no name attached. A representative for the donor offered one clue, as Rolling Stone later told it: "I cannot tell you who the money is coming from, but his favorite color is purple."

Jones refused the check. The story of that refusal made its way back to the man who wrote it, and Prince found it so funny that he called Jones up and befriended him.

That is how much of Prince's giving worked: no name, no press, and a sense of humor about the arrangement. Since his death, the people on the receiving end have started saying out loud what they had kept quiet.

Start with a drummer. Clyde Stubblefield played the break on James Brown's "Funky Drummer," which Billboard calls a cornerstone of hip-hop and the most sampled beat in the genre. After Stubblefield was diagnosed with bladder cancer, Prince's people called his wife with one question: how much did he need to pay off his medical bills? Billboard reported that Prince's donation toward the treatment was $80,000, and that Prince asked for it to be kept from the press.

Jones has given two reasons for that silence. One was faith. Jones said on CNN he believed Prince's faith explained his preference for quiet charity. The other was taste. In a piece published by the Guardian, Jones said Prince thought it was in poor taste for celebrities to write a check and then have their publicists all over the media bragging about it.

So the gifts landed without a return address. Jones helped distribute some of them, including solar panels for families in Oakland, and those families never knew who their benefactor was. The Bridge for Youth, which serves runaway and homeless youth, received $23,000 through Prince's Love 4 One Another Charities about a decade before he died. It did not realize he was behind the donation until after his death. In 1993 he gave $200,000 to the Harvest Network of Schools in Minneapolis. A manager there told MPR News: "There was no press release or big event. He simply found out about our school and felt that it added value to the community."

Some recipients knew and kept the secret anyway. Prince sent money to the family of Trayvon Martin. Martin's mother, Sybrina Fulton, said on MSNBC that Prince wanted no recognition.

With Jones, the support grew into something longer than a check. Prince worked with him on Green for All, which creates green jobs in disadvantaged communities, and on #YesWeCode, which teaches urban youth about technology. "He was always about economic independence," Jones told Rolling Stone. Jones later said Yes We Code had 15 major technology companies working with kids. He also recalled Prince tying the Trayvon Martin shooting to questions of opportunity and technology, and making the point that a black kid wearing a hoodie might be stereotyped. Jones has his own name for the job he did in all this: Prince's "lead guitarist for social impact."

The help Prince gave other artists was easier to see, because some of it is on records. "The best thing about producing is that there are so many really talented people out there who just never got that push over the top," he told Rolling Stone in 1990. By then he had produced Mavis Staples, George Clinton and Bonnie Raitt. Staples signed to his Paisley Park label and stayed seven years, releasing two albums there. The Raitt sessions, which the magazine called his most talked-about reclamation project, never came out. Prince took the blame himself. He said he had been working on a lot of things at once and had not given himself enough time to work with her.

He wrote "Nothing Compares 2 U" in 1985 for the Family, a Paisley Park act. Sinéad O'Connor's version later became the hit. Thirty years after he wrote that song, he and Judith Hill surprise-released her album Back in Time via Live Nation, in 2015. The Current wrote that he supported the British soul singer Laura Mvula much as he did Hill and Janelle Monáe. Even his hiring worked like a scout's: Michael Bland got the drum job after Prince spotted him playing his regular slot at Bunkers, a downtown Minneapolis club.

Not every gift was hidden. Prince gave $1 million to the Harlem Children's Zone, and $250,000 in 2011 to the Eau Claire Promise Zone in Columbia, S.C. The public paper trail is short. Tax filings for his Love 4 One Another foundation show $1.5 million given to charity from 2005 to 2007. About 60 percent of it went to Jehovah's Witnesses organizations in Minneapolis and Las Vegas, and there are no filings after 2007. MPR News concluded that documenting all of Prince's philanthropy is probably impossible, at least without a public accounting from his estate.

Prince once said: "Musicians throughout history have taken care of one another." He said it while talking about the word independent, not about money. Even so, it describes a drummer's hospital bills paid in silence.

The families in Oakland never learned whose money paid for their solar panels. Van Jones, at least, got a hint. It was purple.

“I cannot tell you who the money is coming from, but his favorite color is purple.”

1. Rolling Stone: Prince, the Secret Philanthropist
2. The Guardian: The story behind Prince's low-profile generosity to green causes
3. Billboard: Prince Paid Off 'Funky Drummer' Clyde Stubblefield's Medical Bills
4. MPR News: Prince, the philanthropist
5. GeekWire: Beyond the music, Prince was a quiet but impactful philanthropist
6. Billboard: Mavis Staples on Prince
7. The Current: 59 of Prince's contemporaries and compatriots share how he affected their lives
8. Mojo: Prince interviewed
9. Rolling Stone: Prince Talks (1990)