HBCUs shared the national spotlight with Vice President Kamala Harris, a Howard University alumna. And as the country grappled with a new racial reckoning in the aftermath of George Floyd's death, some HBCUs received high-profile donations.
Philanthropist MacKenzie Scott gave $560 million to HBCUs and Black college organizations across the country in 2020.
Even this year, FAMU and its athletic apparel and equipment provider, Nike, Inc., struck a new a six-year partnership multi-million dollar partnership to make that will make the university the first HBCU to become a Nike Elite program and the first to have its sports teams don LeBron James-branded apparel.
But many officials and higher education experts say a single year of exposure and headline-grabbing donations cannot solve a longstanding issue. The pervasive underfunding and discriminatory treatment of HBCUs by state governments, philanthropists and corporations is going to take much more effort to reverse.
HBCUs were founded in the cauldron of segregation and evolved over time through the debates between the merits of an industrial art (hence the names A&M and A&T) or liberal arts education to occupy a special space in the pantheon of American higher education. Founded during a period of hostile, entrenched and legally enforced segregation, by most accounts, these institutions have exceeded expectations in unforeseen ways.
However, from the start, black colleges depended upon white philanthropy and later state government for financial support. For much of their existence, because of segregation, HBCUs have enjoyed a pure monopoly on African-American students and faculty members. And almost single-handedly, HBCUs have created the nation’s black middle class, comprising teachers, doctors, lawyers, engineers, scientists and entrepreneurs.
“HBCUs are the legacy of people who were enslaved and legally prohibited to read and write, and almost immediately as they were emancipated, they built colleges — not elementary schools. They built colleges,” said Rodney Hurst, a civil rights activist and historian, and author of “It Was Never about A Hot Dog and a Coke”, a personal account of Jacksonville’s lunch counter sit-ins in the 1960s. “They sat in them and learned to read and write. There’s no better educational story in this country.”
“It’s not surprising that during a moment of national agony on race that minority-serving institutions stand out,” said Ruth Simmons, president of Prairie View A&M Univ. “We been around since 1850s doing the same work continuously throughout that time. … I think it’s our time to be recognized for what we’ve always been able to do and accomplish.”