Sam L. Polk Sr. is the director of the Department of Facilities Management and Associate Professor at Tennessee State University in Nashville, Tennessee and serves as APPA’s Vice President for Educational Programs. He can be contacted at spolk@tnstate.edu.

Historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) are accredited institutions of higher learning established prior to 1964 with the principal mission of educating African Americans. Since their beginning in the 1830s, HBCUs have evolved and grown and today number 103 schools located in 20 states, the District of Columbia, and the Virgin Islands. Historically black colleges and universities enroll more than 370,000 students and graduate about one-third of all African American students each year, according to the National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education (NAFEO). As shown in the chart on the next page, HBCUs are found in four of APPA’s six regions; only the Rocky Mountain and Pacific Coast regions do not have any. HBCUs include public and private schools, two- and four-year institutions, and graduate and professional schools. Many of these schools have been educating students for more than 100 years.

HBCUs, despite many obstacles, are committed to an educational process where neither ethnicity nor economics is allowed to stand in the way of any student realizing his or her true potential. It is a commitment these schools still honor and a goal they will work to achieve one student at a time. These institutions know the value of “learning for life” and “learning by doing,” and that work experiences, internships, and hands-on experimentation are an integral part of an education that prepares students for the real world of the twenty-first century.

Before the Civil War, higher education for black students was virtually non existent. A school called The Institute for Colored Youth was started by a group of Philadelphia Quakers in 1830 and later renamed Cheyney University, thus becoming the first college for blacks. College education was also available to a limited number of black students at schools like Oberlin College in Ohio and Berea College in Kentucky (both colleges were hotbeds of abolitionists and believed in interracial education). Only two historically black private colleges, Lincoln University in Pennsylvania and Wilberforce University in Ohio, existed prior to the Civil War. Years later, with the abolition of slavery, the Morrill Land-Grant Act of 1862 allowed the opening of colleges and universities to educate farmers, scientists, and teachers. Although many such institutions were created, few were open or inviting to blacks, particularly in the South. Only Alcorn State University in Mississippi was created explicitly as a black land-grant college. Twenty-eight years later, the second Morrill Act of 1890 was passed. This act specified that states using federal land-grant funds must either make their schools open to both black and white students or allocate money for segregated black colleges to serve as an alternative to white schools. A total of 16 black institutions received land-grant funds from the Morrill Act of 1890.

Most of today’s public HBCUs were founded by state legislative action between 1870 and 1910. Prior to this time, many black organizations, along with support from the American Missionary Association (AMA), black churches, and the Freedmen’s Bureau, were responsible for establishing private colleges and universities to educate blacks. Between 1861 and 1870, AMA funded seven black colleges and 13 normal or teaching schools. These institutions became the backbone of black higher education, producing African American leaders for generations to come, including such notables as Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Dubois.

By 1928, attendance at HBCUs increased substantially as did financial support from the government and individual philanthropists such as John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie. HBCUs also gained credibility and respect when the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools began formally surveying and accrediting them.

HBCUs began to face many new challenges; the great depression and World War II left many black colleges in a financial crisis. Most land-grant HBCUs were still dismally under-funded when compared to their white counterparts. Private HBCUs were in an even tougher bind. In 1943, Dr. Fredrick D. Patterson, president of the Tuskegee Institute, published an open letter urging HBCUs to band together to pool their resources and fundraising abilities. The next year, the United Negro College Fund (UNCF) began soliciting donations to fund private HBCUs with far greater efficiency than any one of its member colleges had ever done alone. Its motto as you may recall is “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.”

During the early 1950s, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) turned its efforts from educational equality to school desegregation. As a result, new optimism for HBCUs was realized. In 1953, HBCUs became the beneficiaries of the Supreme Court’s decision in the case of Brown v. the Board of Education. The court ruling that “separate but equal” schooling was anything but equal meant that states would be forced to better fund HBCUs and open their other universities to black students. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 provided the federal government greater power to enforce desegregation.

In 1965, the federal government provided aid to HBCUs through the Higher Education Act. This was followed by another important judicial decision, Adam v. Richardson, in which ten states were found in violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 for supporting segregated schools. These states were ordered to work actively to integrate institutions, as long as the integration was not carried out at the expense of HBCUs. The administrations of Presidents Carter, Reagan, and George H. W. Bush made significant commitments to HBCUs with programs to strengthen and expand the capacity of HBCUs (Carter), an executive order reversing the effects of previous discriminating treatments of HBCUs (Reagan), and establishment of a commission in the Department of Education responsible for advising the President on matters regarding HBCUs (Bush).

In 1992, a decision by the United States Supreme Court in United States v. Fordice required that Mississippi abolish the remnants of a dual segregated system of education. A similar agreement was made in Tennessee with the Geier v. Sunquest litigation settlement in 2001.

In 2004, a 29-year-old legal battle over state support was ended when the United States Supreme Court cleared the way for a $500 million desegregation settlement for three HBCUs: Jackson State, Mississippi Valley State, and Alcorn State. This settlement will allow the correction of past facility neglect due to inappropriate state funding support.

As you can see, HBCUs have come a long way and today continue to provide a unique education for African Americans and all other students. Black students who attend HBCUs graduate with greater frequency than black students at predominately white universities and are more involved in academic and social events.

According to the 2002 edition of The Princeton Review, three of the public, four-year HBCUs now have a majority of white students: Lincoln University in Missouri, 57 percent; West Virginia State College, 86 percent; and Bluefield State College also in West Virginia, 89 percent.

Other public HBCUs with sizable white enrollment include the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, Delaware State University, Savannah State University in Georgia, Kentucky State University, Bowie State University in Maryland, Elizabeth City State College and Winston-Salem State University in North Carolina, and Langston University in Oklahoma.

While some educators and administrators say this is a sign that HBCUs are successfully competing with other institutions, others fear that the heritage and mission of black schools may be jeopardized. Experts say that among others, the reason for this diversity is due in part to the effect of desegregation, aggressive recruitment, economic value, and expansion of high quality undergraduate, graduate, and professional program offerings.

Recently, there have been financial problems at two HBCUs—Grambling in Louisiana and Morris Brown in Georgia. The talk of closure is devastating, but is consistent with the history of HBCUs being under funded, confronted with large deferred maintenance backlogs, and enduring a shortage of maintenance staff and management personnel. Since 1976, at least a dozen HBCUs have closed due to poor funding and problems among their leadership. Another six are on probation. This alone is why APPA should know and reach out to HBCUs for membership and to offer our knowledge, expertise, and yes, resources. Currently, 35 percent (36 out of 103) of all HBCUs hold membership in APPA.  After all, it is APPA’s goal to have all institutions of higher learning accept APPA as their “Association of Choice.”

Even with their storied history, HBCUs are alive, yet struggling, and still meeting their original purposes. As evidence of this, according to the African American Registry, HBCUs account for 3 percent of all institutions of higher learning in America, enroll 16 percent of all African American students in higher education, and graduate 30 percent of all African American students earning bachelors’ degrees. On a specialized level, HBCUs have trained 75 percent of black Ph.D.s, 85 percent of black physicians, 46 percent of black business executives, 50 percent of black pharmacists, 50 percent of black engineers, 50 percent of black attorneys, 45 percent of black dentists, and 75 percent of black veterinarians. Additionally, HBCUs are responsible for 53.4 percent of African American public school teachers. Because of these numbers, HBCUs continue to be a significant part of the higher education in the United States.