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  • “Yet with A Steady Beat”: Advocating Historically Black Colleges and Universities as Black Women in the Age of Trump’s America
  • Kayla C. Elliott (bio), Brittany-Rae Gregory (bio), and Crystal A. deGregory (bio)

Collectively, we write this essay from our respective positions as a current Historically Black College and University (HBCU) student, an HBCU alumna and graduate researcher, and an HBCU alumna, professor, and administrator. As Black women committed to racial equity and the intersectional study of higher education, we evoke the words of United States Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who, in the consequential 1992 United States v. Fordice ruling, began his concurring opinion by evoking the words of Fisk University alumnus and noted sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois: “We must rally to the defense of our schools. We must repudiate this unbearable assumption of the right to kill institutions unless they conform to one narrow standard.”

Although he remains an adamant dissenter of university admissions policies that consider race, Justice Thomas further offered support for the mission and value of Black HBCUs in his concurring opinion:

Although I agree that a State is not constitutionally required to maintain its historically black institutions as such. . . . I do not understand our opinion [End Page 12] to hold that a State is forbidden from doing so. It would be ironic, to say the least, if the institutions that sustained blacks during segregation were themselves destroyed in an effort to combat its vestiges.

The election of Donald Trump as the 45th president of the United States has necessitated our surprising agreement with Justice Thomas, as well as other peculiarities. For the Black students, alumni, staff, and faculty of Historically Black Colleges and Universities, HBCUs have served as affirming spaces for growth and learning, and they continue to do so at this very moment. While imperfect, they are no more imperfect than other institutions across the higher-educational landscape. They are better, however, than any of their counterparts in the celebration and centering of Blackness. College students across the country rightfully protest for the removal of monuments to white supremacy and Black oppression in public spaces. Students at HBCUs enjoy their campus’s centering of monuments to Black liberation for figures such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Medgar Evers, Rosa Parks, John Mercer Langston, and the Greensboro Four. In doing so, these institutions provide refuge from the hail of white supremacy that has rained on, and reigned over, people of color in this nation since its inception.

Indeed, the United States of America has overworked and undersupported HBCUs as it has other Black institutions, plotting and profiting from their demise. Since the founding of the very first Black higher-educational institutions during the mid-1800s, HBCUs have had a precarious relationship with the federal and state governments. With the election of the 45th president of the United States, this tension has been amplified for several noteworthy reasons. Among them is the removal of any reference to civil rights from the White House website on January 20, 2017. Likewise, his incongruous choices for presidential nominations and appointments, including the appointment of billionaire philanthropist and charter school champion Betsy DeVos as secretary of education did not lend confidence in the likelihood that President Trump would commit his office to supporting Black people or Black institutions—including HBCUs.

As one of her earliest official acts, Secretary DeVos visited Howard University, a Washington, DC–based HBCU, to the surprise of many—including some Howard stakeholders. But despite her well-publicized visit to “The Capstone,” it is no secret that Secretary DeVos similarly got off on the wrong foot with HBCUs. HBCU students and supporters are not soon to forgive Secretary DeVos for her mischaracterization of HBCUs as paradigms of school choice, when, in fact, they were founded as a result of the absence of choice and also because of the omnipresence of racism in the American experience. [End Page 13] It has been an established truth that the founding of freedmen’s schools-turned-HBCUs in the aftermath of the Civil War spurred the expansion and wider acceptance of public educational opportunities among Southern Whites, and they forced the creation of the first public...

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