We can build the sort of Negro university which will emancipate not simply the black folk of the United States but those white folk who, in their effort to suppress Negroes have killed their own culture. 

W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Negro College,” in The Crisis, 1933

I recently wrote an essay entitled, “We Have Been Here Before,” which outlined how black folk have worked to overcome the challenges of the political system in the US. This essay will outline one of the chief institutions that black folk created in the face of these obstacles, with the support of benevolent white folk, to move this nation closer to a more perfect union.

Since before 1619, members of the African diaspora have lived, labored, and loved on the land that is now the United States of America. Throughout that time, black folk desired to free themselves from oppressive rule. In 1776 in Philadelphia, several influential members of early American society drafted a document that bound the thirteen colonies not to British rule, but to a new national ideal with its cornerstones of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. In the very midst of these intense dialogues, these founders intentionally accepted what James Baldwin termed “America’s Lie.”

The lie that was created at the very foundation of this nation is the lie that empowered a no-knock warrant to be executed in Louisville, Kentucky, in which Brianna Taylor was lynched by the same first-line responders with whom she served. This lie gave George Zimmerman the authority to follow, question, and execute an unarmed Black teenager–simply because he decided to walk in the rain. This lie was on full display on May 25, 2020, when Derek Chauvin placed his knee firmly on the neck of George Floyd, despite the pleas of bystanders begging the officer to let Mr. Floyd up–and despite the cries of Mr. Floyd himself, calling out to his mother, whom he surely saw as he was transitioning to the realm of the ancestors. This lie remains in America’s psyche nearly 250 years later.

Derek Chauvin, George Zimmerman, and the thousands of Americans who have openly lynched black people have often been shielded from prosecutionand moral reflection due to America’s Lie.1

Since their arrival on the shores of colonial America, black folk have fought to overcome the Lie. Fighting to prove their humanity by becoming active participants in the American experiment via military involvement, joining the paid labor force, and participating in national celebrations–many Black folk, while always understanding the bridge and connection to the continent of Africa, became true believers in the idea of the American dream. Upon the formal death of slavery, black folk fought for and achieved access to two institutions that laid the foundations for their multigenerational fight to advance American democracy: the black church and black education.

In the fall of 1837, with the founding of the Institute for Colored Youth (later Cheyney University), the first degree-granting black college in the United States, the black college movement began.2

These colleges and universities created what historian Jelani Favors refers to as the “communitas” of black political and social development, in short, a “blueprint for Black liberation.”3

Unbeknownst to the benefactors of these early institutions, the black college movement created a crusade that attacked the foundations of the Lie. These institutions developed leaders–religious, educational, and political leaders–who forced America to deal with the Lie it created. From Fisk University came alumni W. E. B. Du Bois and John Hope Franklin–scholars who informed the world of the history of Africans in America–their civilizations and their culture. The Morehouse Man, Martin Luther King Jr., forced America to revisit the Declaration of Independence and challenged the country to live up to what it said it was on paper. Lincoln University’s own Thurgood Marshall, the civil rights icon, changed the law to include Black people in all aspects of the judiciary.

From the mid-1800s, black colleges have created a firewall around the ideals of American democracy. Citizens of the United States of America owe these institutions and their alumni a great deal of gratitude for that.

Specifically, during the nation’s infancy, there was a struggle over the meaning of liberal democracy—and what the US Constitution meant in invoking “the people.” As early as the 1830s, black people, systematically challenged the framers of the America political system, demanding inclusion through the creation of black higher educational . Via the establishment of black higher education, first in Cheyney, Pennsylvania, then in Lincoln, Pennsylvania, advocates of black higher education desired to educate a race of people with the ultimate goal of full citizenship.

This point is best highlighted by the formerly enslaved Charles Whiteside. The white man who had enslaved him informed Whiteside that he had no freedom because he had no education, and that it was education that made a man free.

Notably, according to Carter G. Woodson, this line of thinking was promoted by the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison during an address to the black professional class in Philadelphia when he argued that “knowledge was power” and that to break the chains of slavery, the black community must have access to higher forms of education.4

Through the struggle to establish black higher education, black folk and their advocates were also pushing the nation to reconsider the concept of liberal democracy. Due to the generational fight that black folk waged to secure access to higher education and the barriers erected to ensure that access would not come quickly, American society moved closer to the ideals of a liberal democracy by the mid-twentieth century.

However, stiff headwinds remain. Inadequate funding; curricular debates; the recruitment and sustenance of faculty who are not only academically qualified to serve but also compassionate about the people they are charged with molding into modern citizens.

In MAGA America, black colleges find themselves in a position similar to that of black colleges of the early twentieth century. This was a time when government officials wanted these colleges to produce a vocational/technically trained student who would “become productive citizens” in the American workforce.  To borrow a phrase from historian Leon Litwack, while history does not repeat itself, it does rhyme.

Today, in the early twenty-first century, colleges broadly and black colleges specifically are placing a heavy emphasis on Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education–both with curricular changes and mission drift. These changes are requiring college admissions teams to shift their recruitment strategies from a practice of providing access and opportunity for those students who desire the ability to pursue the American dream via education–to a mission of recruiting students who will graduate within four academic years prepared to work in a field that the federal or state government deems as a field of need.

The “un”intended consequences of this push has led to a decline in access to higher education.  Specifically, according to a study published in 2016, the number of black and disabled learners enrolling in four-year colleges and universities has decreased.

This trend is largely the result of this renewed focus on higher education’s industrial push.5

Now is the time for scholars, academics, and leaders in the higher education space to make the university anew. Education has always been the great equalizer for the working class and disadvantaged. As the beneficiaries of these early institutions, we must engage in the struggle to ensure this generation and those who follow have the same level of access to them, thus ensuring the American dream remains in reach. Lest we forget!!!

Reginald K. Ellis, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of History and African American Studies at Florida A&M University.

Suggested Reading on the History of Black Higher Education

James Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935 (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1988).

Eddie R. Cole, The Campus Color Line: College Presidents and the Struggle for Black Freedom (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020).

Reginald K. Ellis, Between Washington and Du Bois: The Racial Politics of James Edward Shepard (Gainesville: The University Press of Florida, 2017).

Adam Fairclough, A Class of Their Own: Black Teachers in the Segregated South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).

Jelani M. Favors, Shelter in a Time of Storm: How Black Colleges Fostered Generations of Leadership and Activism (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2019).

Bobby L. Lovett, “A Touch of Greatness:” A History of Tennessee State University (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2012).

Crystal R. Sanders, A Forgotten Migration: Black Southerners, Segregation Scholarships and the Debt Owed to Public HBCUs (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2024).

Gerald L. Smith, A Black Educator in the Segregated South: Kentucky’s Rufus B. Atwood (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1994).

John Silvanus Wilson, Jr., Hope and Healing: Black Colleges and the Future of American Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press, 2023).

Carter G. Woodson, The Education of the Negro Prior to 1861 (Washington, DC: Association for the Study of African American Life and History Press, 1919).