The Importance of HBCUs in the Making of American Democracy
Part of the "Symposium on Religion and American Democracy."
The Importance of HBCUs in the Making of American Democracy Speakers: Jelani M. Favors, Henry E. Frye Distinguished Professor of History, North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University; Tony Frazier, Assistant Professor of History, The Pennsylvania State University; Crystal R. Sanders, Associate Professor of African American Studies, Emory University; John Silvanus Wilson, Jr., MTS ’81, EdM ’82, EdD ’85, Managing Director, Open Leadership Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Moderated by Dean Marla F. Frederick.
This event took place on September 27, 2024.
SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School.
SPEAKER 2: Symposium on religion and American democracy. The importance of HBCUs in the making of American democracy. September 27, 2024.
MARLA F. FREDERICK: What a phenomenal first panel. I want to give them around of applause. I don't know if they're still here or not, but that's just an extraordinary panel. I am so looking forward to this our second panel. The impact and importance of HBCUs in the making of American democracy. HBCUs sit at the center of history in the making of American democracy. They represent the over 100 schools, which were founded between 1835 and 1965 for African-Americans, and subsequently designated historically Black colleges and universities by the Higher Education Act of 1965.
The first three HBCUs Lincoln, Cheyney, and Wilberforce were founded prior to the Civil war, and the majority of the remaining HBCUs were organized during the period immediately following the Civil War and before 1910. These schools were founded largely under duress. As Jarvis Givens notes in his most recent book, Fugitive Pedagogy, Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching, after the Civil war, and especially in the decades following the end of reconstruction, Black education in the South was violently suppressed or starved of adequate state funding and left to perish.
Between 1866 and 1876, well over 600 Black Southern schools were burned. At the turn of the 20th century, W.E.B. Du Bois described whites fierce opposition to Black education as having, "showed itself in ashes, insult, and blood." Formerly enslaved persons unable to attend white universities and need of education and skills to survive, pooled their minimal resources together to figure a way forward. Through the aid of Black religious bodies, white Northern missionaries, and religious organizations, and eventually with government funding for land grant institutions, over 100 historically Black colleges and universities were established.
Approximately 119 of the 240 Negro institutions. This is a quote of higher education counted by a self-study provided by Northern philanthropists in 1910 became four year colleges. Of the original 119 colleges, there are approximately 103 remaining open today. As many have pointed out, historians and scholars have pointed out, our democracy did not simply appear simply because it was declared. Instead, it took a Civil War, numerous amendments like the 13th and 19th Amendment, a women's rights movement, a civil rights movement, and today numerous ongoing lawsuits to realize the promise of democracy.
And I would add here, it took historically black colleges and universities. Not only have they produced leaders like Martin Luther King Junior and Thurgood Marshall, who we all know, and contemporary leaders like Jim Clyburn and Stacey Abrams, Vice President Kamala Harris, and one of our special guest.
[LAUGHTER]
Thank you so much, Tracy. I am a graduate of Spelman College.
[APPLAUSE]
And Senator Raphael Warnock. They also opened doors of possibility for immigrants to the United States trying to establish themselves professionally. I put up a picture here with this title. It's a picture of an organization that my parents were part of at Atlanta University, where they both earned their MBAs. And in that picture, you can see that there are South Asians there. My parents talked about the number of African students who were there. So it served, HBCUs, in large part served as a professionalizing place for immigrants coming to the United States.
This image along with this history really reflects the importance of the work that HBCUs have done and continue to do for the making of democracy. And so I am truly excited today to bring to you a panel of scholars and leaders who have been thinking and writing about historically black colleges and universities. And so I would like to invite them to the podium as I introduce them. Their full bios are in your programs. But today I will moderate the conversation. I will moderate this conversation of scholars. We have to my left, well, I will start on the far right.
Professor Jelani Favors. He's the Henry E. Frye distinguished Professor of history from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, North Carolina A&C.
[LAUGHTER]
So good to have you. Professor Tony Frazier, who taught for years at North Carolina Central University and is now Professor of history at the Pennsylvania State University. Professor Crystal Sanders is associate Professor of African-American Studies from Emory University. And a three time graduate of Harvard, Dr. John Silvanus Wilson, who is Managing Director of the Open Leadership Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also a former president of Morehouse College and former executive director of the White House Initiative on historically black colleges and universities.
I also want to point out that we have another special guest with us today who is not on the panel this morning, but gave a beautiful blessing on last night. One whom carries with him HBCUs near and dear to his heart, the Reverend Dr. Robert M. Franklin Junior. Would you please stand up?
[APPLAUSE]
He is currently at my previous academic home before coming here Emory University. Dr. Franklin is an HDS graduate, I might add. He also served as president of Morehouse College from 2007 to 2012. And now holds the position of the inaugural James T. and Berta Laney chair in moral leadership at the Candler School of Theology. And so, Dr. Franklin, perhaps you have a question or two for our panelists today as well.
I just might want to note that Harvard Divinity School produces presidents of Morehouse College. So if your ambition is to become president of Morehouse College, I would highly recommend that you stop by Harvard Divinity School. And so with that, I want to start our panel discussion. Thank you all. We imagine ourselves creating a multiracial multireligious religious democracy. It is, some might argue, an experiment of the highest order. I'd like for you all to talk to me about how HBCUs have helped to shape the possibility of American democracy?
JOHN SILVANUS WILSON: I'll start. I'll point out, though, that in addition to Bob Franklin and myself, HDS has produced two other HBCU presidents. One being the first being Mordecai Wyatt Johnston, who was a longtime president of Howard University. And another being Ben Payton, a long time president of Tuskegee. So that's four. So what you said is really true.
[LAUGHTER]
MARLA F. FREDERICK: And may I say this, too. I'm going to add to this. Morris College in Sumter, South Carolina has helped produce HDS deans because Preston Williams mother graduated from Morris College. And my father graduated from Morris College.
JOHN SILVANUS WILSON: There we go.
MARLA F. FREDERICK: There we go.
JOHN SILVANUS WILSON: There we go.
[LAUGHTER]
So in terms of HBCUs and democracy, I think it's pretty clear that HBCUs had a lot to do with American democracy maturing. Basically, HBCUs deliberately, aggressively shaped the generals and-- the foot soldiers and the generals of the civil rights movement that would change democracy. The measurable results are two civil rights acts, Voting Rights Act, all in the '60s, and the opening of American higher education, as well as other things. One of the things I asked in my book is, why didn't the civil rights movement happened 100 years before it did?
And it didn't because places like Harvard, the other Ivy Leagues, they were not about democracy they are about aristocracy. And it took HBCUs to do that. So I think the evidence is there. And I think one of the things we're going to have to do is we're going to have to ensure that the rest of higher education, not just in this country but in the world, figure out the secret of what HBCUs did in the middle of the the last century and continue to do. And they have a lot to learn from the HBCU community.
The problem is the change hasn't happened the way it should, and those institutions have not evolved enough, the PWIs because for most of their history they have been reflective of the problem of democracy and too reflective of it to be corrective of it.
CRYSTAL R. SANDERS: Marla, when I think of-- well, first thank you for inviting me to participate in this event. But when I think of HBCUs and democracy, I think of someone like Simon Atkins, who created present day Winston-Salem State University in 1892.
JELANI M. FAVORS: Teachers College.
CRYSTAL R. SANDERS: And soon after he opens the institution, he creates its motto, which is enter to learn, depart to serve. And I think that motto is indicative of the missions of all HBCUs, which inculcate a mission that's greater than personal gain for HBCU students. So letting them know that they're not just going into this institution to make money or to get a job, but they're hopefully going to matriculate and graduate and use the experiences and the opportunities they were given to improve society. Or we could say, to expand opportunity and freedom for all.
And the one thing I'll say with regard to this question and even this panel is I think we have to take a global look at the contribution of HBCUs to democracy. If we think about the first president of Nigeria, Azikiwe, 1929 graduate of Lincoln, or the first president of Ghana, Nkrumah, 1939 graduate of Lincoln, or even something like Thurgood Marshall writing the Constitution for Kenya, their first Constitution after independence, we see that it's HBCU students really trying to help people all across the world live up to these professed ideals of freedom and equality.
TONY FRAZIER: Marla, I want to thank you for inviting me as well. To John and Crystal's points, are very good points. HBCUs definitely have a heritage of scholarship. They have a heritage of educating black leadership many, many ways in a vineyard of black leadership. That's where it comes from, pushing the boundaries of knowledge. For me, you're going to hear his name a couple of times up here today, Dr. James Shepard, the founder of North Carolina Central University. He created a motto of truth and service. And he really did believe in American democracy and the promise. And he pushed his institution, and he pushed his students to live that ethos. So I think that all combines that. And so--
JELANI M. FAVORS: Thank you, Marla, for having us here. It's an honor to be with you all. I'm going to borrow a phrase from Eddie Glaude, who talked about the importance of these Black spaces and why they matter. In the recent documentary, he talked about doing the work of imagination. And I think that's what HBCUs have represented. This space where black youth could see themselves not as inferior, not as second class citizens, not as piccaninnies or sambos, which was the dominant message being pushed in American popular culture and American politics, but to see themselves as change agents.
And I think the story has to start at the very beginning. In my book, Shelter in a Time of Storm, I talk about the importance of the Institute for Colored Youth, which would ultimately become Cheyney State University, the first HBCU. I know that's very contentious.
MARLA F. FREDERICK: That's interesting.
JELANI M. FAVORS: Sorry, with apologies to anybody from Lincoln? I recognize Cheyney State University as the first HBCU. But think about that moment in which Cheyney State is founded, which the Institute for Colored Youth is founded. It's founded in 1837. That's a moment where the electorate is actually beginning to expand for the first time to empower working class white men. And so the fact that HBCUs are created within that space, a very violent space in a place like Philadelphia, it highlights the work that's going to begin to take shape in that space.
And look at what happens with Octavius Catto, who is one of the first graduates of the Institute for Colored Youth. He's assassinated. Killed in the streets of Philadelphia in 1871. Why? Because he was working to expand voting rights for African-Americans. He and his students were lobbying Congress for the passage of the 15th Amendment. So to your question about what have HBCUs done to reshape American democracy, this is a question and this is a subject which has been very much prevalent within these spaces from the very, very beginning.
MARLA F. FREDERICK: Have you talked about this, the secrets of HBCUs in the mid century like if there's a secret sauce. Can you all talk about what that constituted and maybe even talk more about the humanities, and the work of the humanities at HBCUs. And really the kind of disinvestment in humanities and the threat that poses to the future of our imagination about democracy.
JELANI M. FAVORS: Yeah. I'll jump right in there. That's the work of imagination and that's what the humanities have often represented. In my work I talk about the notion of this second curriculum is that, yes, HBCUs are teaching Greek and Latin and philosophy and all the other things that Harvard and Yale are teaching. But they also have this second curriculum, which is dominated by race consciousness. How do we counter our white supremacist society, which is trying to teach black youth that, again, they are inferior?
We have to have the space where we can cultivate a sense of race consciousness amongst our students in order to counter that. The second piece is cultural nationalism. When Nikole Hannah-Jones takes this position at Howard University, she says she does so because she wants to build up her own. Well, that's something which has been a dominant notion within black colleges. Again, since the very outset, they were producing race men and race women who saw themselves as critical agents of change.
But more importantly, they understood the vital importance of building up black spaces, of building up black organizations, of building up black colleges, and black businesses. And they very much embraced that and saw that as part of their mission, part of their charge. And then the third piece which, again, I think is relevant to the conversation today, is that they taught idealism. They talked constantly, talked about democracy and citizenship in the primary sources that I consulted for my study. Those were two words that popped up all the time in black college newspapers. They were constantly talking about citizenship and democracy in a space where they were denied citizenship and democracy.
So it's a very, very deliberate tone, a very, very deliberate curriculum that's being administered. That is the secret sauce of how do we-- one of the things that the questions that really led me to engage in the work that produced that first book is how do we produce Ella Baker? How do we produce a Diane Nash? How do we produce a John Lewis? How do we produce a Marla Frederick? I mean, this is a long serving secret sauce. The political ingredients that have gone into it have transformed and produced generations of activists and leaders and scholars who have been at the forefront of transformation and change in America.
TONY FRAZIER: Marla, I don't know how you get to the secret sauce. You just you walk in the space. You've been taught in the space, and you walk in there and you see these wonderful students in front of you, some of them who are dynamic in the beginning, some of them who are very rough in the beginning. And how do you push them? How do you move them? Folks come along and say, well, what's the pedagogy? Well, sometimes it may not be a fancy word to put on it. You just go in there and you do the work, and you're trying to motivate them to your larger point, and push them to think about things larger than themselves.
So how do you capture that? How do you move them? And you walk in this space and you're teaching students about 18th century Europe, and now you explain to them that black people have a role in 18th century Europe beyond slavery. There's a space for them there. So you get them to understand that, yeah, we're talking about Western civilization, but you also in this. And how do you teach those values and push them? And that's something that you constantly do. You don't-- and the students are pushed back, and you're trying to explain that to them. So the secret sauce, I don't know if we're ever going to be able to explain it.
We're going to continue to write books and try to explain it. But it's something that's very dynamic, and sometimes it's passed down. I know for me, I remember the first year I had Poli Sci-- my first political science professor at NCCU was a Judge Shelley from Durham, North Carolina. So she's teaching us about participatory democracy. I'll never forgot her. I still have her lecture notes from that class. But that's something she stressed to us in that classroom. Now I have a judge teaching me Poli SCI. So that's a beautiful thing. So you don't know where this is going to come from. So the South is just a source.
[LAUGHTER]
MARLA F. FREDERICK: And it's a secret. [LAUGHS] No.
TONY FRAZIER: It's a secret.
CRYSTAL R. SANDERS: What it sounds like Jelani and Tony are saying is that the secret sauce includes the work of dedicated faculty and administrators. If we think about, institutional histories, I think of someone like Willa Player, the president of Bennett College
TONY FRAZIER: Yes.
CRYSTAL R. SANDERS: And she was constantly stressing that Bennett College is a liberal arts institution where students have to really take what they're learning in the classroom and apply it in larger society. So at one point in 1963, 75% of Bennett's student body is in jail. They've all been arrested. And the Board of Trustees is saying what's happening? Bennett parents are saying what's happening? And Dr. Player essentially says they have implemented what they have learned in the classroom. And we should be celebrating the fact that they understand they have a role to play.
They have a responsibility not just to study democracy, not just to study citizenship, but to go out and demand it, to go out and act on it. And I mean, there's countless examples. At Tougaloo College, Ernst Borinski, who's a German Jewish refugee from the Holocaust, who comes to Tuskegee in the 1940s, and he immediately implements something that he calls the social science forums. But he is gathering Tougaloo students to really discuss segregation, disfranchisement, and all of the other assaults on black citizenship. Sitting in those forums are people like Joyce Ladner, Hollis Watkins, Lawrence Guyot.
And so they're sitting around after class having these conversations weekly. So we shouldn't be surprised that they then go act on it. When they get arrested, they are doing what they've learned. They're connecting the praxis with the theory. And that, I think, is the secret sauce that all of these HBCUs have had dedicated faculty and administrators who help students to make those connections between what they're learning and how it applies in the real world.
JOHN SILVANUS WILSON: I think, echoing what W.E.B. Du Bois was saying for decades really. In 1916, John Dewey said, democracy must be born anew every generation and education is its midwife. I think it's pretty clear that the only subsector of American higher education institutions that have taken that seriously are HBCUs. And I've mentioned the measurable results just a minute ago. I don't think the secret sauce is so secret. It does depend on the people. And that is a key. The point you've all made, I think it is I've thought a lot about it. And you better think about it if you preside at one of these institutions, at any institution.
But it's in the curriculum. It's in the campus culture. It's in the campus communications. And if it goes deep enough in those three places, it'll get into the campus character. The way I describe the secret sauce is HBCUs have been particularly good at giving students a dual competency, a skill set for a better me and a mindset for a better we. All right. The skill set for a better me is, I've got to get a job, I've got to go out and get a family, I've to get a house, get a car. All the things we--
That's not enough, though. You got to have a mindset for a better way. You got to think about. And that's how they produce all those people. One point of contrast. One of the most prominent graduates of a PWI also happens to be one of the most prominent graduates of Harvard. His name is Bill Gates. He came out of here, as a dropout of Harvard as a matter of fact. He came out here, became the wealthiest man on the planet. And returns in 2007 as commentor speaker. And he says in his commencement address to Harvard.
I regret that I left Harvard with no real awareness of the tremendous inequality and suffering inequity in the world that is rendering billions of people to lives of despair. I came out of Morehouse. We came out of HBCUs, acutely aware of everything to which Bill Gates was blind. That should make you ask, what is Harvard not doing that it should be doing? And it should make Harvard and all the other PWIs ask, what are HBCUs doing that we should be doing? Giving them not just sight, eyesight, but vision for a new world. That's the secret sauce right there.
[APPLAUSE]
CRYSTAL R. SANDERS: That was beautiful.
[APPLAUSE]
MARLA F. FREDERICK: Powerful. You all have talked about the faculty, the administrators, the curriculum. I want to go back to the administrators because, Crystal, you pointed out the number of students that were in prison. But there is also tension in these movements between administrators and students participating in the Civil Rights movement. Can you all talk about what that looked like because they are between two kind of impulses?
JELANI M. FAVORS: I think we'll let the former president of Morehouse take that question first.
JOHN SILVANUS WILSON: I think she turned to Crystal.
[LAUGHTER]
CRYSTAL R. SANDERS: I mean, to answer that question we can begin to think about the diversity among HBCUs, public, private, Northern, Southern. And so one of the most obvious ways is looking at the differences between how administrators at public HBCUs responded to student protests and the ways that someone like Dr. Player at Bennett could respond to student protests, given the fact that her institution's existence wasn't predicated on an all white state legislature. So we know that at many institutions there was a concern that there would be retribution from white power structures to students advocating for full freedom and full citizenship.
So that's one way to describe. I'm not saying that private institutions were completely free of pushback from administrators, or they didn't have financial concerns from upsetting donors or other philanthropic groups. But there was in some ways, a much more freedom for students from some of these private schools to be more openly active and not risk an institution losing its funding source. To give you an example, though, of a fact that even private schools aren't immune, I go back to the example of Tougaloo. Because by 1964, Tougaloo had become the center of activism in the state of Mississippi, the legislature threatens to take away its charter.
And so Tougaloo starts saying, OK, we got to rein you students in. You can't be in downtown Jackson constantly sitting in at public accommodations because now our whole institutional identity, our whole institutional existence is on the line. So that's to say, it's not that, I use this example of public versus private. But we do know that even among private institutions, leaders are walking a very tight rope to ensure that they don't upset constituencies that are necessary to the survival of the institution.
JOHN SILVANUS WILSON: Crystal is right. I think this question begs a lot of history because I think there has been a debate and some HBCUs were more aggressive, more open than others. All of them were about it. But everyone should keep in mind this was a dangerous thing to be doing. So I got a confession. And it's not going to be strange to any of you, but I used to hate Booker T. Washington. I was taught to hate him. I was taught to love the boys, and hate Washington because Washington was the stereotypical.
And I did that all through Morehouse, so all through graduate school. But in graduate school, I met David Wilson, who is now President of Morgan State. We were in graduate school here together, and he's a Tuskegee grad. And he was begging me to take another look at Booker T. Washington. I was hard headed then and I didn't do it till later on. And I reread. I started reading what Booker T. Washington said. If you read my book, you cannot come away without seeing that I am a lover of Booker T. Washington. All right.
I've come full circle. I've converted because what I describe he had to do in the South and a lot of his counterparts had to do. They had to-- the phrase is they had to manage barbarism. OK. Because Booker T. Washington put his campus. He went down to Tuskegee, Alabama. That was the kind of headquarters for lynching. The federal government came down and did a study of what was going on. And they had hearings about the lynching in Alabama in that area. And that's where he stood up this institution.
He understood that at any given point, he was surrounded by people who could kill him and everybody on his campus with impunity. He had the biggest institution in the South, black or white, 2,300 students on this campus at various points. And all their lives were in his hands. So if he didn't bow sometimes and scratch sometimes, a lot of people would be killed. That phenomenon was happening in HBCUs.
So when-- as we discussed yesterday, when Langston Hughes visits a number of campuses in the South and writes an article called Cowards from the Colleges criticizing them for not being activists and protesting, for instance, the Scottsboro Boys. He goes back to the North where he's safe. They understood that if we start protesting about the Scottsboro Boys, we could get killed tomorrow if not tonight. So there's an interesting dynamic. It took a lot of courage for HBCUs to be as activists as they were. And if they would have been more activists had they not been surrounded by barbarism.
CRYSTAL R. SANDERS: Can I just say, John. I pushed my students all the time to rethink Booker T. Washington. I wrote an article because Booker T. Washington had a policy that he only could hire black people. So Tuskegee has an all-black faculty until 1915. Even after Washington dies in 1915 as really and tribute to his policy, Tuskegee doesn't get a non black faculty member until the 1950s. And it's actually an Indian American. And so we see at Tuskegee from the very beginning, black people are making all of the decisions. Black people are writing the checks. And so we hear about this beef with Du Bois, this classical education versus industrial education.
But Tuskegee is bringing all of these really educated African-Americans into rural, excuse me, rural Alabama. And white people are having to see these educated people. He's bringing Roscoe Bruce from Harvard. He's bringing Robert Taylor from MIT. All of these he's going around and recruiting them. If you go into PWI archives and HBCU archives, you'll see where Washington had appointments to meet with the presidents of these institutions to say, what black students do you have and tell them they must come here. So the way George Washington Carver gets to Tuskegee is because Washington is truly hounding him, writing all of these letters to Carver at Iowa State.
And Carver is saying no time and time again because he's already on faculty at Iowa State. And it's the last letter where Washington says, if you don't come, I'll going to be forced to hire a white man, and that's something I've never done at this institution. And so he tells Carver, I know the money might be less than what you're getting at Iowa State, but you should do this for the race. It's all there in the letter. And there are countless letters like that. And that's how he assembles really this cadre of just the best and the brightest.
JOHN SILVANUS WILSON: He wrote four separate letters to W.E.B. Du Bois.
CRYSTAL R. SANDERS: That's right.
JOHN SILVANUS WILSON: Trying to recruit him.
CRYSTAL R. SANDERS: Yeah. That's right.
JELANI M. FAVORS: OK. Can I jump in on that? To the point that you're making, Crystal and John, my dissertation advisor told me that the job of a historian or really any writer is to challenge your reader to rethink what they thought they already knew. And nothing really pushed me more on that in my book than dealing with black college presidents. I remember sending out my chapter on Southern University to Mac Jones. Mac Jones is one of the deans of the field of black political science. Has taught at Clark Atlanta University for a number of years. His son is Bomani Jones for those who might follow sports entertainment.
So I sent this out to Mac Jones, who had been expelled from Southern University. And in the opening of that chapter, I really kind of knew and really tried to poke fun of Felton Clark, who was the president of Southern University for over 40 years, but he's also president during the sit-ins. And so I opened up that chapter talking about some of his policies and some of his politics. And Mac Jones says to me, again this is a man who was expelled by Felton Clark, be careful with how you handle Felton Clark. And he said that before the sit-ins took place, we actually thought of him as a race man. And that he was very much endearing to us on campus.
We thought of him as a father figure. We thought of him as an architect of this space. It's Felton Clark who, to your point Crystal, recruits Rodney Higgins to come to campus, who again, is seen as a founder of the field of black political science. Recruits Jewel Prestage, again, another prominent figure within the political science field. Recruits Elsie Lewis, who was one of the first black women to earn a PhD in the field of history. Invites Elsie Lewis and again, what is Elsie Lewis and Rodney Higgins. What are they doing? They're doing the work of participatory democracy. They're holding these voting clinics on campus.
They're going outside of the campus into the Scotlandville community that surrounds Southern University. They're engaging the citizenship about how we can, and how we should access the ballot? And so it's Felton Clark, who really plays a critical role in shaping all that and then the sit-ins it and there's all this pressure to Crack down. And it's not just Felton Clark, but throughout the deep South, particularly at these public institutions, these state institutions where so many of those black college presidents felt that pressure. And so I had to rethink how I characterize, how I dealt with, and describe the legacy of black college presidents during that time because it is indeed a very complex picture that it deserves greater attention.
TONY FRAZIER: I don't want to besmirch Booker T. Washington. I don't want to go deep in love either.
[LAUGHTER]
The criticisms are legitimate in terms of the control of black higher education. The money's certainly salute him on a lot of his vision. But the critiques of him are legit. And we can go to Ida B. Wells and others about him. So anytime I'm teaching him, it's not just Du Bois and Washington, because I really find it problematic that we set up our history in a paradigm of two men and those two men in particular. So Ida B. Wells is always part of my lecture, and her critique of Booker T. Washington is very succinct. So yeah.
MARLA F. FREDERICK: So we complicated him.
TONY FRAZIER: Yeah. The goal is to complicate him. It's not that you can-- I want you to love him, but I also want you to understand him from many different narratives. There's more than one narrative to understand Booker T, Washington. Yeah. We have to push back a little bit.
JELANI M. FAVORS: Read the book.
MARLA F. FREDERICK: I love it. Can you all talk to me a bit about-- we've talked mostly about undergraduate education, but I want to talk about the significance of these professional schools that HBCUs are working to establish, particularly the law schools and the effect of their openings and their closings on American democracy.
CRYSTAL R. SANDERS: I'll begin. That's what my new book has done.
[LAUGHTER]
So when we think of black educational opportunity during the era of Jim Crow, as late as 1936, there were only graduate and professional school programs at seven black universities or colleges or universities, and they were all private. It's after 1936 that we began to see public institutions create graduate programs, and that's in response to black demand for these programs. So we know that, the NAACP had been going into court to show that with respect to graduate education, it's not separate and unequal, but it's separate and nonexistent in the sense that North Carolina, Virginia, Florida, they all have law schools for white students, but there is not a Black counterpart.
And African-Americans go into court and demand that. And so we see that with the Lloyd Gaines case. 1938 Lloyd Gaines has graduated from Lincoln University of Missouri, top of his class. He wants to go to University of Missouri law school because he is the son of a widow mom. He does not want to leave the state. Missouri admitted they did admit non-whites, but you couldn't be black. So they are admitting people from around the world while they're not admitting African-Americans. And so when he goes into court with the NAACP hoping to compel the University of Missouri to admit him, the court stopped short of that and doesn't compel the University to admit African-Americans, but says you must create a law school for black students if you're going to have a law school for white students.
And so we see in Missouri setting up a black law school at Lincoln. That would become a-- we could say there would be a domino effect. So the Gaines decision is in '38. North Carolina in response to the Gaines decision it's going to create NCCU law school in 1939. We're going to see several other states, Louisiana, South Carolina, Florida, all creating law schools as a way to attempt to comply with separate but equal. We know that these schools would not be funded at any type of level that would make them equal to their white counterparts. But as black colleges have done time and time again, they did more with less.
And so we began to see these law schools producing the very people who are going to help to dismantle legal segregation. So we think about the types of jurists or attorneys that are coming out of North Carolina Central that are coming out of South Carolina State law school. And these are individuals who use that training to then begin to help other students file lawsuits to desegregate these flagship institutions.
So I say that these are, Louis McMillan, who was a professor at South Carolina State, says these were institutions born of protest, meaning they weren't created because the state one day decides that African-Americans should have the same opportunities, but they are created as a way to hopefully keep federal authorities from looking down the backs of these Southern state legislatures that are not providing equal opportunities for African-Americans. And so we see when many of these states are finally made to desegregate their flagship institutions, that several of these law schools are closed.
So that gives us a sense that there was really no commitment to really ensuring that there would be these professional school programs at black colleges. So South Carolina State is a great example. Once the University of South Carolina has to begin admitting black students, what does the legislature do? They don't decide, we'll have two law schools that we can fund well in our state, but we're going to close this black law school. It's again, an example of the ways in which we see a lack of commitment and a lack of investment from Southern state governments into black institutions. And that's something that we're still seeing today.
TONY FRAZIER: Yeah. Just very quickly. Go ahead. Go Crystal's point, at North Carolina Central, Dr. Shepard he's maneuvering behind the scenes to get these programs. But they're also born out of this struggle of not having these programs. And those lawyers who worked on those cases, those prior generations, those people had graduated from North Carolina Central University. So they were totally at odds with his vision. So that created a problem. So you have the National NAACP looking at Shepard like you've sold us out.
And the students who he produced make an argument in support of the National NAACP. So they end up having this huge conversation. And the people from Durham outright say, we can attack Shepard but you can't. So these things are not always crystal clear. So they're fighting against the man who they honor, but at the same time, they don't want anyone outside Durham critiquing him. Yeah.
JELANI M. FAVORS: I was going to add that they further illustrate the whole point of this conversation. That's how radically different HBCUs have been in terms of the model of education they've represented. When these law schools are created, they produce a wave of lawyer activists who take on segregation. I mean, think about Howard University. Think about Southern University. Think about Florida A&M University. The lawyers that are coming out of there are going to be leaders of the movement. And so to borrow a phrase of the urban philosopher Kendrick Lamar, they're not like us in terms of the work that they're doing.
And black colleges have always set this example, have been set apart in terms of the agency, in terms of the activism they produce and, again, that's the secret sauce. The deliberate curriculum that they're being exposed to within those spaces that empower them to go out there and to deconstruct white supremacy where they find it.
CRYSTAL R. SANDERS: And that secret sauce that makes me think of Howard. When Charles Hamilton Houston comes to Howard Law, he says, we're going to produce social engineers. You can either be a parasite or a social engineer. He starts telling students that on day one. And so he's essentially saying you're either going to use your training to help us begin to dismantle racial apartheid in the United States, or you might as well leave this law school.
JELANI M. FAVORS: And he aggressively weeds them out.
CRYSTAL R. SANDERS: Yes. He does.
JELANI M. FAVORS: I only want the best because we have a serious task at hand.
TONY FRAZIER: Yeah, with the classic look to your left look to your right. Some of you won't be here at the end of the semester.
CRYSTAL R. SANDERS: Yeah. Because he says you're useless. You're a parasite.
JOHN SILVANUS WILSON: And that was hostile in some places that look to your left or right. I tried to change that as president. I said, look to your left, look to your right. Take care of that brother because that's your brother.
JELANI M. FAVORS: We need them.
JOHN SILVANUS WILSON: But I do think to this question, the point has been well made on the emphasis on being different. The only thing I'll say about that is this what Vernon Jordan said of Howard Law School. He said, Howard Law School is the West Point of the Civil Rights movement.
CRYSTAL R. SANDERS: Wow. Yes.
JOHN SILVANUS WILSON: If we find that equivalent for all of our graduate schools, and I say all of higher education because it's not just a black thing. All right. If we make all of our educational system, the West Point for democracy, the theme of this conference, then we'll have a better world.
TONY FRAZIER: Yeah.
JOHN SILVANUS WILSON: Full stop.
MARLA F. FREDERICK: I was looking at the time. I still have a time left off. I am like in question number 1A.
[LAUGHTER]
JOHN SILVANUS WILSON: Go to B.
[LAUGHTER]
MARLA F. FREDERICK: So many wonderful directions to go. But I just I want to do-- I want to ask two questions and then allow you all to choose how you want to respond. Crystal, you talked a little bit earlier just about the impact of HBCUs globally, but I want you all to talk about the kind of multiracial nature of the professional and undergraduate schools, both in its students and in its faculty. And so Herskovits is at Howard at one point. Howard Zinn is teaching at Spelman. I'll bring Nikki Haley's father, who taught a long time at Denmark Tech.
CRYSTAL R. SANDERS: Yeah.
MARLA F. FREDERICK: I know. And so these faculties have historically been very diverse and the student bodies have worked to educate beyond black students, Native Americans, South Asians, poor whites. Can you talk about the impact of that kind of vision of HBCUs leadership?
TONY FRAZIER: So Crystal alluded to this earlier, and I want to say this, at Iowa University, Dr. Manassas taught philosophy. He retired in 1973. Of course, he didn't teach me. I'm not that old. But he had escaped Nazism and North Carolina Central was a place and Dr. Shephard hired him. And he always said Dr. Shepard saved his life because those faculty who ended up at HBCUs escaping Nazism, that was a very important thing for them. But they also brought their talents with them as well. And one of the students that Dr. Manassas influenced deeply was Julius Chambers.
So that young history student who he had in his class, goes on to become Julius Chambers, who we know is the great lawyer, and future president of NCCU once he matriculates back. So these institutions, our institutions, they have that capacity. And they still have that capacity. If you come to NCCU now you're going to see a diverse faculty. You always had a diverse faculty. My chemistry Professor was from India. And I didn't learn much chemistry, but we had a great time talking about India.
[LAUGHTER]
So in the student bodies reflect that as well. You have huge contingents of Latino students. We have white students. So these spaces have always been about democracy and giving people an opportunity. And I think that reflects the vision of a lot of the founders, and I think that's important. I do want to say this, and I'll move on very quickly. I'm going to salute somebody like a Mary McLeod Bethune in terms of her vision and what she did for this country. But an HBCU produced her and then she founded one. So just think about that first generation and then the second generation. She's founded an institution. So these are very rich things that come out of that as well.
CRYSTAL R. SANDERS: And just to piggyback off of that, Tony, except where mandated by law, black colleges have always been open to all.
TONY FRAZIER: Yes.
CRYSTAL R. SANDERS: And that's very different than a place like Harvard where we're sitting right now. So you could say from their founding, they've offered us a vision of what a multiracial democracy could look like. Where you've had black and white students learning together or black and Native American students learning together. You've had students from all over the world. I argue that black colleges were some of the first to allow students from other parts of the world to matriculate in their student bodies. So we could really see from their beginning that they've had-- they've offered us a vision of what higher education can be. They've given us this idea of educational equality and equity from their earliest years.
And if we could study that going back to John's thoughts, institutions like Harvard needing to look at what HBCUs have done well, and we see that they've had this expansive vision since their founding. And we know that most PWIs have not had such an expansive vision from their founding.
JOHN SILVANUS WILSON: And speaking of the founding, your question brings to mind my perception of Christianity because HBCUs were diverse from the start. You made the comments in the opening about when they were founded. One of the reasons why. W.E.B. Du Bois called the period of the birth of HBCUs, the thrust of them right after emancipation was because he called it the finest display of democracy the world has ever seen. He said that because a lot of white Americans who call themselves Christians drop their lives. They were in New England.
TONY FRAZIER: Yes.
JOHN SILVANUS WILSON: They dropped what they were doing. Their Christianity caused them to do that. They came South and helped to stand up HBCUs. That's the kind of Christian. Now there's one set of Christians, white Americans who call themselves Christians, who helped to make black colleges possible. There's another set of white Americans who call themselves Christians who ensured that HBCUs would be necessary. Those are two different religions.
[LAUGHTER]
FYI. They're very different. All right. And I want to insist that that difference is key, and we haven't resolved it. We haven't resolved it yet. The Ku Klux Klan was a Christian organization. Most lynchings took place on a Sunday afternoon after church. Presumably in the name of Jesus. Not my Jesus, but some Jesus. This is a mix. And Harvard Divinity School can help us sort through this kind of thing and understand what's going on with Christians. The whole history. Because the integration, the possibility of HBCUs and the integrated teaching in some enrollments was from a different kind of Christianity than we see today.
They were not white nationalists, evangelicals. It's a different kind of Christianity, and we need to sort that out and be a force for the other kind. Our slave ancestors. Our slave ancestors. Amen. Amen. Well, the ushers, please come forward.
[LAUGHTER]
Now, our slave ancestors understood that point and they put it in a song that went, everybody talking about heaven ain't going there.
CRYSTAL R. SANDERS: Yeah. That's right.
JOHN SILVANUS WILSON: They said we're not the same kind of Christianity as some other Christians. That's what that meant.
MARLA F. FREDERICK: My final question before we go into audience Q&A has to do with a kind of Renaissance in thinking about talking about HBCUs today. We saw even in philanthropic donations to HBCUs, MacKenzie Scott has given over half $1 billion to HBCUs. Michael Bloomberg recently donated $600 million to HBCU medical schools. At the same time, college state schools have had to sue state governments in order for them to make amends for the ways in which they have historically defunded them compared to their state institutions, flagship state institutions.
How do we make sense of-- it's not really even making sense. But what do state governments and maybe even PWIs owe to HBCUs for the kind of yeoman's work that they've done in building American democracy. We've talked about so much the HBCUs have given with such few resources. But what then do we owe HBCUs? Talk about that.
JELANI M. FAVORS: Let me jump up in North Carolina A&T State University, which is where I'm employed, which is also my alma mater, has been deliberately underfunded by the state of North Carolina since the 1980s alone close to $3 billion. I'll say that again, $3 billion. Now what could any HBCU do? What could any institution of higher learning do with $3 billion? I think the question is more about the criminality of it all. And that's the legacy of white supremacy. That's the legacy of Jim Crow. That's a legacy of segregation playing out right before our eyes.
Again, that's not going back to 1891 when the institution was founded. That's just since the 1980s alone. And so when we think about this catch up game. When we think about the fact that the Harvard's of the world and the Yales of the world and the Stanford's of the world and the University of Michigan's of the world, that all of these institutions have very much benefited from a legacy of white supremacy, which has created this huge chasm of disparity. And that black colleges have often been on the short end of that stick. I think it calls for us to have truth and reconciliation about that, and that reconciliation has to be very much rooted in some form of reparations, is that we need reparations for these institutions.
[APPLAUSE]
And so in the state of North Carolina, our students are acutely aware of this. And you see this every year at HBCUs in particular. Right at the opening of the semester you see students complaining about a lack of housing. You see students complaining about a lack of parking. And all are the infrastructure issues. And one of the things I often tell my students, instead of taking the TikTok, instead of taking to Instagram to voice your displeasure with North Carolina antique, let's go to Raleigh and tell them to pay us what they owe us. And we can rectify a lot of these issues.
TONY FRAZIER: I think the debt has been paid, but they're being measured by standards that are unbelievable. But the standards should be about what they have endured to still be here. And that seems to be forgotten. It's almost as if we're asking these institutions, because when we look at the-- we got the sunny side. But then when we look at the other side, the side that it's not so pretty. You're asking these institutions to make bricks without straw. You really are.
JELANI M. FAVORS: And they have. And they have.
TONY FRAZIER: And they have. But what do you owe? And there's a lot to be paid to John Silvanus point about reparations, how do you get people to give and then when the giving is done, then you manage that giving? So we know-- we see the stories about institutions that are in trouble, and will they survive? And these are questions that have continued to confront HBCUs. And we don't want to lose any more HBCUs because once they're gone, it's hard to bring them back.
And that means that the institutional history is gone. The people's legacies tend to move away. So how do we get people who are outside the institution to give to see the value of these institutions because they are valuable? But how do you get that from them? And people are making huge donations. But what's to what ends.
CRYSTAL R. SANDERS: I want to piggyback off of Julani's point because, yes, I'm happy MacKenzie Scott and other philanthropists are giving. I want to go back to what the state owes these institutions. So Jelani was referencing in September of 2023, the secretaries of agriculture and the secretaries, or the Secretary of Agriculture and the Secretary of Education sent letters to 16 governors essentially saying, we know that your state has not given its black land grant. Its the funds due under the land grant, the Morrill Act.
And my problem was they dated it from 1987 to 2023. But my new book that just came out talks about this arrangement that I call segregation scholarships, where one way that Southern states tried to say that they were in compliance with separate but equal was to make black students go out of state for anything beyond the bachelor's degree. So I called this arrangement segregation scholarships. But here's the problem. When we think about these segregation scholarships, we have to think about how that arrangement was a disinvestment in black colleges in two main ways.
Number one, many of these states paid for their segregation scholarship programs by taking money out of their public black colleges budgets. So when the state of Florida, for every dime that's used to pay for a black student to pursue a master's or PhD in the North, Midwest, or West, that money was taken out of the annual appropriation of FAMU's budget. And this is something that most states were doing. In Arkansas, any time a black student had to leave the state to get the same thing that white students got at the University of Arkansas paying for that came out of the Pine Bluff budget. That is an insult.
Think about you're robbing Peter to pay Paul because these institutions were already underfunded. But then here's the other thing, Southern states had a choice. They could have created graduate and professional school programs at these black colleges, but they choose not to do that. So that's again, neglecting to create more academic programs at these institutions. I take the example of North Carolina A&T, even after we see a unitary UNC system in the late 1970s, early 1980s, when the state of North Carolina decides that they need a vet school, the question was where that vet school was going to go?
And the department at the time called of health education and welfare, who at the time and now a defunct department within the federal government said given the state's underfunding of A&T, the vet school should go to A&T because that would be a way to bring in more resources and to bring in students who are going to be paying to become veterinarians. After the federal government tells the North Carolina General Assembly this is where it needs to go after black members of the General Assembly like Nikki Marshall say this is where this program needs to go. What does the legislature do? They put the program at NC State.
So we see time and time again when state legislatures could put very revenue generating programs, professional schools in particular at black colleges, they choose not to do so. So we know there's a debt owed and it goes way back before 1987 because these segregation scholarships that I write about start in 1921. But then to what do places like Harvard do? We have to think about the fact that all of these institutions are complicit in helping Southern states to negate having to do right by their black students.
We see all these. Wisconsin is taking money. The universities of Wisconsin is getting large sums of money. If we put it in in today's dollars, it's in the billions. Harvard is getting lots of money. The Oklahoma paid Harvard for John Hope Franklin to come here and get his PhD. What if they said, no, you need to create opportunities for your students. But they had no problem taking those tuition dollars. And then they don't hire black students after they get their PhDs. They were good enough to go here, but they couldn't work here.
And so we have to think about what do these institutions that benefited financially from Southern states refusing to educate Black students, what do they owe? And once we start talking about that, we see a lot of people are on the table for money. We see the Southern state governments, but then we also see these predominantly white institutions who benefited from the lack of educational opportunity in the South.
JOHN SILVANUS WILSON: Let me make two quick points just to contextualize all this. In 1860, the United States GNP, 80% of it was attributable to human enslavement, 80% of the GNP. Any conversation about reparations should take into account that to be 80% of the US GNP today would be $23 trillion. OK. That's in Q2 2024 dollars. I just did that a couple of days ago. So contextualize it. The other thing is I'm pleased that MacKenzie Scott and the others have given.
But look at the big picture. Last year, all giving in the United States was $557 billion. That's all private giving philanthropic. $58 billion to higher education alone. 20 institutions got 30% of that $58 billion. HBCUs have consistently gotten 1% or less even after the gifts from the big, put into context, HBCUs, roughly hundreds of them raise on average three to $4 million each institution per year. Harvard and Yale and them, they raised $3 to $4 million per day all year.
CRYSTAL R. SANDERS: Probably per hour.
JOHN SILVANUS WILSON: Per day. And that gap closure is sizable. So I hope MacKenzie and Jeff and Zuckerberg and a whole lot of other people, black and white, all over the world do that times 10 times 100 in order to catch up because there is tremendous gap closure where philanthropic support for HBCUs is concerned.
TONY FRAZIER: Well, just one last out for faculty who work at these institutions with all this giving and everybody's in a celebratory mood. Some of that money never reaches people's paychecks. So sometimes when you see these news stories about all the money that's being given, just be aware that the workers aren't really seeing that money. OK.
MARLA F. FREDERICK: Often going to infrastructure.
TONY FRAZIER: Yes.
CRYSTAL R. SANDERS: Yeah.
MARLA F. FREDERICK: As I thank the panel and bring this discussion to a close, I do want to highlight for you all for your own reading information. If you want to know more about these topics, just the works that our panelists have written. Jelani Favors has a book out, Shelter in a Time of Storm, how black colleges fostered generations of leadership and activism. Professor Tony Frazier is working on a book on Blacks in Europe. And Professor Crystal Sanders has a book out recently for this year, not even recently, month.
[LAUGHTER]
A Forgotten Migration, Black Southerners, Segregation, Scholarships and the Debt Owed to Public HBCUs. And Dr. John Silvanus Wilson has a book out, Hope and Healing, Black colleges and the Future of American democracy. And so with that, I just want to say thank you so much for such a thoughtful, invigorating, and inspiring conversation.
[APPLAUSE]
SPEAKER 1: Copyright 2024. The president and fellows of Harvard college.
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