There’s obviously many great shared insights and traditions essential to the understanding of Kwanzaa that hopefully will lead to greater respect. I do want to share one insight to a recent controversy down here in Texas that shed light on the HBCU system. I don’t recall when I grew up they had them in the Northeast; we just had colleges. It turns out there aren’t any in New York State from a quick map search. Or in the West. My understanding is limited, but it appears they were set up in Southern states after the Civil War to give education to freed blacks. This is a segregated system, but whites would be accepting of blacks in their schools. On big controversy came in Mississippi in the 1962 when President Kennedy called in the national troops to escort a black student James Meredith, onto the white campus of University of Mississippi in Oxford, MS. The governor, an anti-American segregationist named Ross Bennett block the enrollment of this young man, so Kennedy used the national guard and US federal Marshalls. Barnett defied the Supreme Court and thus the federal troops. Barnett was outraged as were whites and called this the “greatest crisis” since the Civil War. SO one reason obviously was for safety. Dubois went to Harvard, but taught at a couple HBCUs with some difficulty, not from the students but because they were in the South were felt ill at ease and I believe perhaps was threatened. I can’t recall exactly what happened and why he left Atlanta.
But the other reason that persists is money. The controversy is that the state of Texas will not fund the HBCU in Houston with the $2 Billion it received in science, because the one here can’t get the accreditation needed to access those funds under national law, meaning the law deprives them of the fund from the state, as it the governor’s decision. There are two of three in my area, Prairie View A&M and TSU (Texas Southern University). They “lag” in fund, which is a euphemism for funding denial based on historical segregation system that was never dismantled.
In Texas the system is called the land grant institutions were set up in 1862 when Texas part of the CSofA (Confederate States of America). Under that system, all that land grant funding went to white colleges (blacks were considered property). Those schools are known as PWIs, or Predominately White Institutions. That system stayed in place, though Texas A&M is integrated. But the HBCUs in Texas were set up under a separate funding system, which gives them less money and funding. Many think that the dispersal of federal funding is “illegal,” and while it is certainly immoral, the legality of it is a separate issue and linked to laws that give accreditation powers and distributions powers to the governor. The President and Congress won’t intervene because of “State’s Rights.”
So sorry, there are no HBCUs in Iowa, only colleges. If black students in your state, my home state of NY, or Minnesota or California, want to attend a college or university in their state, then they have no choice but to attend “college”. If they want a white one (a PWI) then they need to head Sought or Southeast. However, many should be warned that if they do enroll in the ones in Missouri, they may find 25 to 40 percent of the students are not black, mostly white (probably because it’s safer, too many white supremacists make me even uncomfortable).