Playing at a presidential inauguration is generally one of the highest honors that a historically Black college or university marching band, or any band for that matter, can have. But Talladega College’s possible participation in President-elect Donald Trump’s inaugural parade on Jan. 20 has put the tiny Alabama college on a big, not-so-friendly stage.
“After how Black people were treated at Trump’s rallies, you’re going to go and shuck and jive down Pennsylvania Avenue? For what?” Seinya SamForay said in an interview with the Associated Press. “What they did is a slap in the face to other Black universities.”
Many people just cannot fathom how a school started by former slaves would accept an invite from a man that many feel just ran the most successfully racist presidential campaign since Richard Nixon. They cite the fact that many of the Civil Rights Movement’s primary players came from HBCUs and that many campuses were used as incubators of change before they spilled into the streets of the South in the middle of the 20th century.
While that assertion is valid, it is not entirely historically accurate.
More than a century ago the most prominent product of an HBCU, at least to that point, accepted an invite to The White House that was just as controversial in his time.
Booker T. Washington, a man born a slave in Virginia in the mid-1850s, made headlines nationwide in 1901 when he accepted an invitation to have dinner with Teddy Roosevelt at the White House. Washington, an alumnus of the Hampton Institute and founder of Tuskegee Institute, was the first Black man to have dinner with a president at the White House, which was a social taboo at the time.
