A Declared Winner Alongside Kamala Harris: Historically Black Colleges and Universities
Kamala Harris, Joe Biden’s running mate, is the first graduate of a Historically Black College or University (HBCU) to be selected for one of the highest offices in the country — vice president. Now, everyone, not only graduates, can know they are worthy candidates for positions of power and authority. Harris is celebrated as someone with several firsts — a first with parents of African and Indian descent, and she is the first to have graduated from an HBCU. But it is the latter — HBCU graduate, which will have the greatest impact in the nation.
Full disclosure, my interest is because I am an HBCU graduate, and in fact from the same University as Harris, Howard University. I have long defended the quality and merit of HBCUs. I’ve heard people say they would never send their children to an HBCU, even though they knew I was a graduate, not because they thought these schools were party schools, because predominantly white institutions (PWI) have had greater reputations in that regard. But their refusal to consider HBCUs was because they believed the education to be inferior. All HBCU graduates have seen that underrating stare when they have told some of their white friends or colleagues their college was an HBCU. Further, I am sure more than a few resumes have been put aside because someone graduated from one of the 102 HBCUs in the nation. All that can change now with Kamala Harris.
HBCUs were necessary after the Civil War if African Americans were to receive training in higher education. Simply put, PWIs were not open to African Americans. The first HBCUs were started during slavery — Cheyney University and Lincoln University, in Pennsylvania, and Wilberforce University in Ohio. Several others were launched after slavery and the Civil War. These institutions were initially started to educate previously enslaved African Americans, and included not only postsecondary teaching, but primary and secondary education as well. Sometimes these schools provided the only education available to Black people.
It would be an understatement to say higher education for African Americans was segregated. As late as 1963, a hundred years after The Emancipation Proclamation, white governors were still standing in the doors of PWIs with chants of “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”[i] However, by the mid Civil Rights era, and even after PWIs would desegregate, numerous Black college students would still favor HBCUs as a place they would call home for their post-secondary education. They did not have to confront, at HBCUs, the racism and white supremacy pervasive throughout the nation and other institutions. They would have to be good students, and work hard to succeed, but they did not have to be “twice as good as excellent to succeed,” whatever that was. They did not face being in the perpetual minority, often with their lives in danger — the kind of danger they had witnessed with lynching culture, burned crosses, or simply the violence that often came from being of the wrong race in the wrong place at the wrong time.
These schools not only provided the safe educational space for a people who experienced varying degrees of hostility, but HBCU’s achieved their own areas of proficiency. They have been competitive against PWIs and have become excellent in medicine, law, engineering, teaching, STEM, and other fields of human endeavor. They were started to serve a segregated population of Black Students, but they have always enrolled students from all backgrounds. Many, outside the African American community recognized the expertise and capability of HBCUs, like a white friend I met shortly after graduation. In the lighthearted conversation people often have when they first meet, we realized we were graduates from the same university, me from its Divinity School and him from Dental School. He said the University’s dental school was as competitive as any other, and for the cost, there was no comparison. HBCU graduates have known the value and virtue of an HBCU education for more than 180 years, and now that Kamala Harris was selected for one of the highest offices in the land, more people will know.
Whenever there is a first in human achievement the incorrect assumption has been this was the first person ever qualified.
Whenever there is a first in human achievement the incorrect assumption has been this was the first person ever qualified. In every instance, including the selection of Kamala Harris, this misapprehension of the moment, cannot be further from the truth. People who matriculated from HBCUs are everywhere, and they are not all only people of African descent, as mentioned above with my white friend from the dental school. In fact, these schools have always promoted themselves to be inclusive institutions. Howard’s medical school, for example, says it “has been an interracial institution throughout its history, with students, faculty and staff of all races and from many foreign nations.”[ii]
HBCU graduates are not only capable at the same levels of the general population, but have been everywhere, and have held significant positions in society. A good example of the prevalence of HBCU graduates, as well as a paradigm of their intelligence and expertise, is in medicine. The field lacks diversity, and Black doctors in 2008 were at only 6%. However, more than 90% went to African American medical schools.[iii] The numbers are even higher if doctors who went to HBCUs for their undergraduate work are included.
The prominence, and even the demand, for black doctors from HBCUs is not new, it has been the norm for years. My family has been an HBCU family (full disclosure again), the most accomplished member being my wife’s father Roscoe McKinney, who taught at Howard’s Medical School. He was the first African American to earn a Ph.d in Anatomy. He taught during WWII, and according to his daughter, Frances McKinney, he was required to teach a double load, day and evening classes for each course, a practice that allowed the university to graduate twice the number of Black doctors during the war to meet the demand.[iv] But this prevalence of HBCU graduates was not just in medicine. HBCUs make up only 3% of the nation’s colleges, but their graduates make up 80% of black judges and 50% of black lawyers. HBCU students account for 25 percent of all black undergraduates who earn degrees in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics).”[v]
Kamala Harris is one of the exceptional HBCU graduates to be selected Joe Biden’s running mate. I am sure she is both capable and worthy to serve in such a high position. However, skilled worthwhile HBCU graduates have made a huge impact on the development of American history and culture. Again, they are literally everywhere. HBCU graduates accounted for 27,000 of the African Americans who graduated from college in 2015, or 15% of all degrees earned by African Americans that year.[vi] In that same year there were nearly 300,000 people enrolled in HBCUs.[vii] If we were able to take inventory of people in our society with influential positions and jobs, again we would find the impact HBCUs to be immeasurable, even before Harris’ history making selection as a first vice presidential candidate of African and Indian descent, and from an HBCU.
Marian Wright Edelman, for example, is a person who has had immense impact in her advocacy and political work. She was the first Black Woman admitted to the Mississippi Bar,[viii] and her work as the founder and leader of the Children’s Defense Fund has made a great impact in child advocacy. She has been known for being one of the attorneys, who worked with Martin Luther King, Jr. in the Civil Rights movement. Marilyn Mosby is the youngest person in the nation to have served as a chief prosecutor in a U.S. city as States Attorney in Baltimore, MD.[ix] Mosby is a younger person, with a high level of political prominence. This suggests the HBCU attraction is not a thing of the past, but it has extended beyond the days of segregation. Kasim Reed, the former mayor of Atlanta, also suggests many capable and worthy African American leaders first choice, even today, can be HBCU schools for their college career.[v]
The list is long of outstanding leaders in the nation who went to HBCUs. It would be difficult to name them all in one article, but some who are household names are: Civil Rights icon, Martin Luther King, Jr.; Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall; media mogul Oprah Winfrey; film director Spike Lee; politicians Barbara Jordan, Kwesi Mfume, Elijah Cummings, James Clyburn, and John Lewis; football star, now television personality, Michael Strahan; and so many others in every field of human enterprise. This is a short list, but these and so many others have been not only change-makers, but firsts. They, and so many unnamed others, have made vast contributions to the nation, world, and American culture. These persons are exceptional whatever school they would have attended, as I’m sure is the case with Kamala Harris. They would have, and could have, reached the twice as good as other students at PWIs, if they chose to, but they decided to attend HBCUs.
Kamala Harris was exposed to an exceptional educational experience at an HBCU, challenging her to excellence, public service, political and social advocacy, and to an understanding of holistic community. HBCU students did not just start being “woke” and capable to lead in positions of power and authority with Kamala Harris. These merits and virtues are part of the required scholarship to graduate from an HBCU. The Kamala Harrises, Thurgood Marshalls, Barbara Jordans, and Oprah Winfreys are exceptional, but at HBCUs these merits are part of the pedagogical landscape. This is a fact HBCU graduates have known going all the way back to the period of slavery and the first HBCUs, but now that one from the HBCU ranks, Kamala Harris, was selected to be a presidential running mate, the whole world can know.
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[i] Quote from George Wallace, Inaugural address, Jan. 14, 1963
[ii] Howard University Medical School website, https://medicine.howard.edu/about-us
[iii] “HBCUs and the Production of Doctors,” AIMS Health, November 27, 2017, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6111265/ accessed, 26 October 2020
[iv] Discussion with Frances McKinney, October 30, 2020
[v] Harris, Adam, “Why America Needs HBCU’s” The Atlantic, May 16, 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/05/howard-universitys-president-why-america-needs-hbcus/589582/ accessed, 28 October 2020
[vi] Anderson, Monica, “A Look at Historically Black Colleges and Universities as Howard Turns 150,” February 28, 2017. Pew Research Center, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/02/28/a-look-at-historically-black-colleges-and-universities-as-howard-turns-150/ accessed 26 October 2020
[vii] Burns, Dominique, “100 Influential HBCU Alumni,” August 13, 2018, The Moguldom Nation, https://moguldom.com/153381/100-influential-hbcu-alumni/ accessed 26 October 2020
[viii] (The Moguldum Nation, 2018)
[ix] (The Moguldum Nation, 2018)
[x] (The Moguldum Nation, 2018)
