NEW YORK – Two of the nation’s foremost Black academics and experts on historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) say the 100 predominantly Black schools around the country may be fighting to survive, but they remain relevant as they train students how to create justice in the world and accept themselves.
Dr. Johnnetta B. Cole, former president of Bennett and Spelman colleges, and Dr. Jafari Allen, director of Africana Studies at the University of Miami and a Morehouse man, shared how HBCUs have evolved over the years at a Tuesday night event centered around a screening of “Tell Them We Are Rising: The Story of Historically Black Colleges and Universities.” The Stanley Nelson documentary aired on PBS in 2017.
The screening was the last in a series hosted by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and Dr. Elizabeth Alexander, president of the organization and former chair of the African American Studies Department at Yale. The aim of the series was to expose audiences to documentaries that promote race and class diversity.
The conversation looped around St. Augustine’s and Fisk, Howard Law School and Bennett College, the all-women’s institution in Greensboro, N.C., now suing to keep its accreditation.
In the 30-minute portion of the film shown during the screening, audience members saw students at Bennett and other HBCUs integrate lunch counters in the South and shopping counters at Rich’s, the exclusive department store. One student in the film shared how frustrating it was to have to hold back from reacting when she and others were spat on and called names. The students sang and clapped when they were abused and arrested in order to keep an upbeat appearance.
Cole said such demonstrations were important for the women at Bennett, who had the reputation of showing up to events with purses and White gloves, and for HBCU students overall because it trained them not so much to enter the middle class but to understand their responsibility to fight for justice.
“What I think is so important about what I think Brother Stanley Nelson has done is that he reminds us that those were institutions that certainly educated African-American women and men to better understand the world — that’s one responsibility of an institution — but it also educated these youngins to know that they had a responsibility to help to change the world,” Cole said. “What the film does is to help us understand how essential HBCUs were in social activism.”
