Harvard University's Hutchins Center for African and African-American Research has received a $10 million gift from alumnus Glenn Hutchins, the Wall Street Journal reports.

The gift from Hutchins, co-founder of private equity firm Silver Lake, will fund a longitudinal study of residents of poor neighborhoods in the greater Boston area, with the goal of collecting sufficient data to generate insights that can influence public policy. William Julius Wilson, a professor in the Harvard Kennedy School who will lead the study, told the Journal he hoped to use interviews and large public data sets such as tax records to dig into the lives of poor residents and better understand the interconnecting disadvantages that perpetuate poverty.

The gift comes as black studies programs across the country have been cut or reduced, according to Georgene Bess-Montgomery, president of the National Council for Black Studies. The Hutchins gift, she told the Journal, is to her knowledge the largest gift to an African-American studies program in the country. "A gift like this validates and adds value to what we do." Hutchins donated $15 million to create the center in 2013.

"We have had this remarkable growth of the black middle and upper middle class and we also have this black underclass that is perpetuating itself," said Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and director of the center. "Without some kind of penetrating analysis and intervention, people like me worry this class divide will go on forever in two parallel worlds and they will never meet. That is intolerable."