Charles Barkley makes $1 million donation to women’s athletics at Auburn

Charles Barkley’s love for his alma mater, Auburn University, knows no bounds as he consistently supports the sports teams, especially basketball, at all times. Taking things one step further, the NBA legend announced his intentions to donate $1 million to women’s athletics at Auburn.

“I just want to make sure I always take care of the women at Auburn because I worry about them more than anything during this NIL movement,” he said. “Everybody’s worried about football and basketball. I just want to make sure the women know I’ve got a lot of love and appreciation for them.”

This donation came in addition to his pledge of $1 million to St. Mary’s, a Catholic school in New Orleans earlier this month. Two of the school’s former students, Calcea Johnson and Ne’Kiya Jackson, were in the news last year as they used trigonometry to prove the 2,000-year-old Pythagorean Theorem, something mathematicians once believed to be impossible.

“These beautiful Black women, man, they’re just the high achievers,” Barkley said per AL.com. “(They) did something in mathematics that was incredible. It just inspired me.”

Charles Barkley to bequeath $5 million for Black students in Auburn

In June 2023, the Supreme Court ruled against the affirmative action admission programs at Harvard and UNC. The court upheld that “race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina were unlawful.”

After this, Charles Barkley committed to amend his will and bequeath $5 million to Auburn University, with the purpose of establishing scholarships for Black students. Initially, Barkley’s plan was to leave an endowment for any economically disadvantaged student at Auburn. He changed this after the ruling.

“After that ruling, my phone was blowing up. I was talking to my friends and said, ‘I need to make sure Black folks always have a place at Auburn,'” Barkley said per Ebony.

“In my will, I am leaving Auburn $5 million. I’m going to change it to be just for scholarships for Black students. That’s just my way of trying to make sure Auburn stays diverse.”

Charles Barkley’s generosity toward schools and colleges is not a first as he previously donated $1 million to several Historically Black Colleges and Universities, like Spellman, Tuskegee, Miles College, Morehouse, Alabama A&M, Clark Atlanta, Bethune-Cookman, and Jackson State.

After his former Auburn teammate Gary Godfrey was diagnosed with ALS in 2019, Barkley also donated $1 million to the disease’s research in Alabama.