I can still see the look of pride on my mother’s face when, in 1967, I told her I had been accepted at Morgan State University. Maybe you’ve never heard of the school, but where I grew up, in the projects of Baltimore, it was like getting into Harvard. The 156-year-old historically Black university—the largest HBCU in Maryland—boasts an impressive roster of alumni, from Black Enterprise magazine founder Earl Graves Sr. to the NASA data science pioneer Valerie M. Thomas. The Black professionals I knew as a kid were mainly Morgan grads, including our family physician and most of my public school teachers.
My mother was a passionate believer in education. After moving to Baltimore from North Carolina as part of the “Great Migration” in the 1940s, she earned a typewriting certificate from the Cortez Peters Business School, founded in 1934 by Howard University–educated Cortez Peters as one of the first Black-owned vocational institutes to prepare African Americans for business and secretarial jobs. Unfortunately, the pressures of poverty and raising four kids prevented her from pursuing her dream of going to college.
It would be different for me. Tuition at Morgan and other HBCUs at that time was well below the cost at predominantly white institutions, but it was still too high for a family dependent on public assistance and living paycheck to paycheck. I understood that I would have to work my way through Morgan, and I did.
It turned out to be one of the best decisions of my life. At Morgan, I studied under distinguished professors who noticed my aptitude for language. Waters Turpin introduced me to the novels of Richard Wright and James Baldwin and encouraged me to submit my poems to the annual Morgan poetry anthology. Ruthe T. Sheffey took a special interest in me and somehow made Chaucer and Shakespeare interesting to a Black kid from the ghetto. I was also nurtured by the tough love of people like Morgan’s then president, Martin Jenkins, who told us at freshman convocation to look to our right and our left because one of us would not be there the following year. Then there was Helen “Mom” Roberts, who ran the student canteen. She cared enough for us to throw us out when we would have rather played cards than go to class.
My life was also enriched by being at Morgan during the height of the civil rights movement. I remember campus visits from luminaries like Baldwin and Muhammad Ali. I attended campus civil rights rallies and marched with students at Baltimore’s Northwood Plaza Shopping Center to oppose segregation and at Annapolis to protest the state’s systemic underfunding of Morgan. These experiences formed the foundation of my lifelong commitment to social justice.
It’s hard to exaggerate the impact HBCUs have had on Black America. They have produced 40 percent of Black engineers and members of Congress, 50 percent of Black lawyers, 70 percent of Black doctors, and a staggering 80 percent of Black judges.
The lessons I learned, the people I met, and the values I absorbed at Morgan took me to places I had never imagined. After college and a series of public relations positions I was hired as press secretary for Maryland Representative Kweisi Mfume (also a Morgan grad), for whom I started writing speeches. That led to a job as speechwriter for Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala. From there I moved to the Clinton White House, eventually becoming chief presidential speechwriter, the first African American in history to hold that position. Since then, I’ve written speeches for an array of leaders in government, business, and academia—including, fittingly, former Morgan State University president Earl S. Richardson.
It’s hard to exaggerate the impact HBCUs have had on Black America. They have produced 40 percent of Black engineers and members of Congress, 50 percent of Black lawyers, 70 percent of Black doctors, and a staggering 80 percent of Black judges. They have achieved this extraordinary success in the face of years of scandalously inequitable funding. A recent federal government study found that between 1987 and 2020, states provided historically Black land grant colleges with roughly $12.6 billion less on a per student basis than their white land grant counterparts. “People don’t really understand what this number means or the magnitude of the loss caused by this gap,” notes Michael Sorrell, president of Paul Quinn College, a Dallas HBCU, and a fellow member of the Washington Monthly Board of Directors. “There simply is no area of American life that would not have been significantly improved if HBCUs had been fairly funded.”
In spite of this abiding injustice, Black students continue to flock to HBCUs—especially since the murder in 2020 of George Floyd, which reinforced the widespread belief among African Americans that they were not safe in many mainstream environments, including on many predominantly white college campuses. Philanthropies have tried to fill some of the gap, MacKenzie Scott’s $560 million in gifts to 23 HBCUs being the greatest example. The bipartisan CHIPS and Science Act, which President Joe Biden signed in 2022, also opens up more research funding for HBCUs and other minority-serving institutions.
Still, the nation’s 107 HBCUs remain underfunded, under-resourced, and academically underestimated. So argue two of America’s leading educational scholars, Marybeth Gasman of Rutgers University and Levon T. Esters of Pennsylvania State University, in their important new book, HBCU: The Power of Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Since 1837, HBCUs have moved millions of African Americans from poverty to the middle class. And they have demonstrated, the authors rightly observe, the “power to transform local communities and improve the quality of life of a city, state and the nation.”
The authors bring decades of research and real-world experience to this work. Gasman, the author and editor of 30 books, has served on the boards of three HBCUs. Esters, whose scholarship focuses on the career development of Black graduate students, is a proud alumnus of two HBCUs. Supported by extensive research, including nearly 60 interviews with HBCU presidents, alumni, and donors, as well as a recounting of their own firsthand experiences, Gasman and Esters provide a compelling, conversational, and comprehensive overview of the current HBCU landscape.
The authors begin by noting that Cheyney University in Pennsylvania was founded in 1837 as the nation’s first Black college. But they go on to remind us that ever since their 1619 North American arrival on slave ships, “Black people quickly understood that education was the pathway to freedom in a new land … Although rarely acknowledged in textbooks, enslaved Africans pursued all forms of education despite laws in southern states forbidding them from reading or writing.” With emancipation in 1863, the nation faced the obligation to educate 4 million formerly enslaved people. Until then, Black colleges were typically founded and run by white and Black missionary organizations, including the AME and AME Zion Churches.
“Rather than merely wanting to provide an education to African Americans,” Gasman and Esters recount, the white missionaries “were focused on spreading Christianity with the goal of ridding Black people of the ‘immoralities’ of slavery and sparing the nation from the ‘menace’ of uneducated African Americans.” They explain that white corporate philanthropists, including John D. Rockefeller, Julius Rosenwald and William Baldwin, and John Slater, expected these colleges to be schools of industrial education. They supported the colleges in order to keep them “under their watchful eye. To receive funds, the colleges had to be incredibly careful not to upset the segregationist power structure that prevailed in the South at the time.” This was also the focus of a major rift between two of the most influential Black educational leaders at that time—Booker T. Washington, who favored the industrial education approach, and W. E. B. Du Bois, who advocated for a focus on producing future leaders through an emphasis on a liberal arts curriculum.
The book tells us that although the passage of the 1890 Morrill Act “provided annual federal appropriations to each state to support land-grant colleges” and “banned racial discrimination in admissions for those institutions receiving federal funding,” it did not eliminate inequities in funding for HBCUs or address the impact of widespread Jim Crow laws on students and administrators or the desire for control by white donors.
Largely through interviews with those most closely affiliated with HBCUs, including college presidents, current and former students, community members, and donors, the authors explore nearly every aspect of the HBCU experience. These include chapters on culture and the impact on Black identity; the remarkable strides in socioeconomic mobility made possible by HBCUs; the community-building prowess of many HBCUs; and the well-documented need for stronger, more stable institutional leadership and improved customer service at these institutions.
Along the way, we learn about the astonishing roster of HBCU leaders and graduates who have made notable contributions to American society. Among them are the civil rights champions Martin Luther King Jr. (Morehouse College) and Jesse Jackson (North Carolina A&T University); the first Black, South Asian woman and HBCU graduate vice president of the United States, Kamala Harris (Howard University); the dynamic social activist and former Georgia state Representative Stacey Abrams (Spelman College); the theologian and activist William Barber II (North Carolina Central University); and outstanding HBCU leaders, including Ruth Simmons, president of Prairie View A&M University; Johnnetta Cole, the first female African American president of Spelman; and David Wilson, president of my alma mater, Morgan. Future leaders like these are currently in the HBCU pipeline.
In an interview with the authors, Cheyney University president Aaron Walton observes that if not for HBCUs, a great deal of Black talent would go undiscovered and untapped, and the nation would not benefit from their contributions. He adds, “HBCUs help create a pool of diverse candidates for occupations that have [been lacking] brown and Black people.”
In addition to a rigorous academic experience, facilitated by excellent professors who take a personal interest in their students’ success, many of these schools and their students have been and continue to be in the forefront of our nation’s social and racial justice movements. The book recounts the seminal role that North Carolina A&T students played in the 1960s “sit-in” movement protesting segregation:
The most prominent example among these sit-ins—and noted by historians as the start of the movement—was the case of the four Black college men from North Carolina A&T State University who refused to leave a segregated Woolworth lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, on February 1, 1960. Throughout their challenge, these young men were supported by the students at nearby Bennett College for Women [another HBCU].
Similar protests occurred at Fisk University and other HBCUs during the antiwar and racial justice movements of the 1960s. Tragically, on May 15, 1970, during a protest at Jackson State, Mississippi state police entered the campus and shot and killed four students.
This book reminds us that although most HBCUs “maintain their historically Black traditions,” on average 13 percent of their students are white, 2 percent are Hispanic, and 2 percent are Asian American. “Some HBCUs today are models for LGBTQ inclusivity,” the authors note, “such as Spelman College with its Audre Lorde curriculum project and Bowie State University with its stand-alone LGBTQIA Resource Center.”
In addition to their unique scholarship, community-building. and social impact prowess, these schools offer something you won’t find anywhere else. Whether describing the vibrant “step shows,” Greek life, the excitement of Black college football rivalries, or the national recognition gained by Black college marching bands and choirs, the authors give readers an inside look at the unique diversity and cultural vibrancy that are the hallmark of the HBCU campus.
The affirmative action debate too often assumes that selective predominantly white institutions are the only avenue of success for young men and women of color. My own experience and this book explode that myth. While we must continue to demand equal access to college across the board, including at so-called elite predominantly white institutions, the authors confirm what many of us have long known: HBCUs are unique centers of excellence and indispensable contributors to the power of our nation.
Esters, a graduate of Florida A&M University (FAMU),echoes the sentiments of many of today’s HBCU students who enter college burdened with economic challenges and the daily reality of racial division and find a welcoming, racism-free comfort zone.
One of the aspects that I enjoyed most about attending college, especially an HBCU, was the journey of personal growth and identity development … Walking the “yard” at FAMU and seeing nothing but a sea of Black students was powerful and instilled a sense of pride and a can-do attitude in me. Attending an HBCU meant you were part of a family.
But this book is not only for those of us who can point to lifelong benefits from having attended an HBCU. It is an invitation to prospective students, their parents, high school college counselors, teachers, professors, scholars, potential donors, policymakers, and anyone interested in learning more about HBCUs—an unsung hero of American higher education.
