What to HBCUs Is the Fourth of July?

Born enslaved, African American abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman Frederick Douglass was never afforded the privilege of formal education. But if he had been, I like to believe he would have called a historically Black college or university his intellectual home. Much like them, he was powered by the conviction that literacy—secured through self-determination—was a transformative tool in the head, hands, and heart of Black people.

Dr. Crystal A. deGregorNearly a century and three-quarters later, his 1852 speech still speaks: “This Fourth of July is yours, not mine.” Written a full decade before the first wave of Black educational institutions broke free from the shackles amid the ashes of slavery, I wonder if Douglass imagined that today, the Fourth would remain—still—a complicated cocktail of patriotism and partisanship. Less and less an expression of the ideal of liberty, and more a persistence of labor under structural inequity.

Nowhere is that contradiction laid bare more than at historically Black colleges and universities. For all of their existence, HBCUs have struggled not for recognition—but for resources. Born not in celebration of liberty, but forged in the fire of freedom betrayed, their survival is a radical declaration: hunger may delay, but it does not deny hope. Although founded in the shadow of slavery and amid the broken promises of Reconstruction’s “moment in the sun,” HBCUs have always been living, breathing testaments of potentiality. Built by and for a people to whom the country owed everything—but who in turn never got much.

And even now—as we approach the 200th anniversary of the founding of Cheyney University of Pennsylvania in 1837—these schools remain storied sanctuaries of survival, assailed by some of politics’ most powerful storms.

Higher education scholars know this struggle all too well—in both dollars and sense. The combined endowments of all HBCUs still don’t rival the single endowment of an institution like Harvard—and several of its Ivy peers. The reasons are many, but none more consequential than the chronic underfunding of public HBCUs by state legislatures, repeated exclusion from targeted federal investments, and a national tendency to undervalue the very institutions that have done the most with the least.

Even the communities these churches of education serve sometimes forget the miracle that they are.

HBCUs remain locked in a relentless negotiation of stretching and shrinking. Still swimming against political riptides. Still pushing forward amid cultural erasure and external (and internal) institutional neglect. Still, somehow, some way—by the faith that Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune, one of fewer than a handful of Black women to found an American college, believed made nothing impossible.