At Public HBCUs, Student Protest Still Comes With a Political Price

PHOTO BY ALLISON BAILEY/NURPHOTO VIA AP

In late April, with graduation barely two weeks off, South Carolina State University students learned through campus chatter that their commencement speaker would be Lt. Gov. Pamela Evette, a Republican gubernatorial candidate whose platform leaned heavily on ending diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs and slashing faculty tenure.

On April 27, roughly 30 students staged a silent sit-in in front of SCSU President Alexander Conyers’ office. A student-generated petition garnered more than 23,000 signatures online, and days of marches unfolded on campus — students moving in large groups, chanting. One chant captured on video: “We are not a mob. We are just aware.” Observers on campus that day noted how peacefully and respectfully students voiced their concerns.

Student Government Association President Zaria Tucker posted a public statement on her Facebook page, saying, “At an HBCU, our legacy is rooted in advocacy, equity, and the power of our voices. When decisions are made without us in moments that belong to us, it matters. ... We are not asking for noise, we are asking for respect. We are not creating division, we are calling for alignment with who we are.”

“This isn’t about politics. This is about representation,” she wrote. “Commencement is one of the most important moments of our collegiate experience, it should reflect the voices, values, and lived experiences of the students it celebrates. Right now, many students are speaking out, not to divide, but to be heard.”

“Our students have exercised their rights in a manner that reflects the importance of civic engagement and respectful discourse within a university community,” Conyers said in a statement at the time.

In the week that followed, the campus community — and the general public — would learn South Carolina State’s Board Chair, Douglas Gantt, personally directed Conyers to extend the invitation to Evette, saying the institution’s leaders needed to maintain relationships with the Republican-controlled legislature and leaders in the state.

The university reversed course, rescinding the invitation, Conyers said, out of “an abundance of caution” for students on campus. In response, nine Republican state representatives — out of 170 — wrote to the House Ways and Means Committee chairman demanding South Carolina State, the state’s only public HBCU, be stripped of funding entirely. “There is no reason,” they wrote, “why state tax dollars should continue to fund a state institution where not all South Carolinians are welcome.” Evette backed the push, doubling down in campaign ads with messages that said things like, “if liberal institutions cancel conservatives, we cancel their funding.”

By June, a handful of Republican lawmakers were reportedly moving to strip a $5 million taxpayer-funded grant earmarked for SC State’s convocation center, explicitly framing the budget action as a warning against ideological censorship on a public campus.

“This issue is not about whether South Carolina State University is an HBCU,” Rep. Melissa Lackey Oremus said at the time. “It’s about whether a publicly funded university should allow a small group of students to decide which viewpoints are acceptable to hear.”

The students themselves said they drew inspiration directly from SC State’s own 1960s civil rights protesters, invoking the university’s history of activism against a nearby segregated bowling alley as they stood up for what they believed was right for their campus.

A Playbook from the 1960s

Dr. Reginald Ellis, currently the dean of graduate education at Clark Atlanta University, is an alumnus and former professor of history at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University (FAMU) and an historian of historically Black colleges and universities and African-American leadership in the Jim Crow era. In a recent conversation with The EDU Ledger, he detailed the conflict presidents at public institutions face when governing student bodies who are culturally and politically in opposition to the leaders of the state.

Storied FAMU President George W. Gore used to leave the state when he knew students were planning to protest in the late 1950s and early 1960s, says Ellis, who previously taught The History of Florida at FAMU. This allowed him plausible deniability when then Governor LeRoy Collins demanded accountability for students’ organization of and participation in the 1956 Tallahassee bus boycott and later the lunch counter sit-ins of 1960.

“He would gather the male faculty members and tell them, ‘protect my students,’” says Ellis.

Though Collins is remembered in the history books as moderate on issues of race, and even, in some records, progressive, “moderate” in that time meant the Democrat favored “gradual and orderly change,” not direct action influenced by the student protests. A southern white governor who saw himself as a racial moderate could reconcile being on the right side of history while still treating student-led disruption as something to be managed and contained, not encouraged.

Ellis says many called Gore a coward at the time for refusing to stand up to Collins directly. But such a classification, he says, is missing the full context of the role of a university president. A Black college president in this era —  and even in the times we are facing now — isn’t the autonomous moral authority the “coward” label implies. In practice, the role requires the chief campus executive to be a middle manager answering to a board he had no power to elect and little power to resist. 

In South Carolina, Evette’s position provoking the students led President Alexander Conyers to rescind the invitation, which Conyers said was initially “rooted in her record as a business leader and entrepreneur. Our intent was to provide students with a speaker whose professional journey could offer practical insight and inspiration as they prepare to enter the workforce,” he wrote in the statement announcing the decision to rescind her invitation.

Conyers cited student safety as the primary reason for uninviting the lieutenant governor, a concern that was justified by prior instances of conservative speakers showing up on HBCU campuses.

 In 2024, a group of conservative men set up a table in Tennessee State University’s quad and posted signs reading “DEI should be illegal” and “Deport all Illegals Now.” Heated verbal confrontations erupted as students confronted the group on the quad. Campus police had to intervene and escort the group off campus within minutes to prevent physical violence. Shortly after, members associated with Blexit —  a conservative movement aiming to turn Black voters Republican — attempted a similar unannounced visit, resulting in another immediate police escort off campus due to rising safety risks. And in 2019, the intense security presence, snipers on rooftops, and physical barricades present during President Donald Trump’s appearance at Benedict College, a private HBCU in South Carolina, underscored how high-profile conservative appearances often turn HBCU campuses into heavily militarized security zones to prevent potential physical violence between students and groups who intend to stir up controversy on HBCU campus.

In the long run, South Carolina State emerged triumphant. Lieutenant Governor Pamela Evette lost in the primary gubernatorial election to Republican Alan Wilson, who was more supportive of South Carolina’s State’s position and chided Evette on the campaign trail for “getting down in the mud, mixing it up with college kids.”

But not all presidents who have faced similar conflicts between the student body and the state government have emerged triumphant.

The Price of Compliance

While Gore managed to avoid immediate termination through careful political maneuvering, state officials kept FAMU’s budget under constant threat and repeatedly sought grounds to remove him throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s. Tennessee Agricultural & Industrial State University (now Tennessee State University) President Walter S. Davis similarly faced similar retribution after students, including Diane Nash, participated in Freedom Rides, sit-ins, and other civil rights protests; state lawmakers repeatedly audited the university, threatened to cut state appropriations, and applied political pressure that ultimately forced Davis into an early retirement in 1968.

In 1967, then-South Carolina State President Benner C. Turner discovered the opposite risk: appeasing the state came with its own cost. After spending much of his 17-year tenure holding the line against student activism and expelling students who participated in protests, a sustained student movement finally forced his removal from campus.

Each of these leaders ran an institution that existed at the mercy of white political power, and each was forced to develop his own private calculus for how much protection he could offer students before the state made him pay for it. In the Civil Rights era, there was no version of the job that let a Black college president be fully on the side of his students and fully secure in his position at the same time, and while today’s presidents may face a little more security in that regard, it is still true that leaders at public institutions are vulnerable to increasing political pressure.

This story originally ran in The EDU Ledger's August 2026 edition. Subscribe here for full access.