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Whether we should tear down the statues of Confederate war Generals because of what they fought for. The purpose of tearing them down would be to potentially forget the history behind them because their fight didn't aline with the rights. The statues are also a painful reminder of past and present institutionalized racism in the United States.

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Pro and Con: Historic Statue Removal in the United States

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Though some may regard removing historic statues as a victory in social justice, others deem it as erasing history.

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-Black homeowners’ property tax burden is 10% to 13% higher than for white homeowners

-Property assessments and appraisals have caused Black homeowners to lose money by way of monthly property tax payments and at the time of sale.

-White college-educated households are more likely to receive a financial gift of over $10,000 from family members than Black college-educated households.

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How the property tax system harms Black homeowners and widens the racial wealth gap | Brookings

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We must confront the inequities in our tax code and housing industry, remove the disparate tax burden from Black homeowners, and make wealth-building through homeownership a reality for more prospective Black homebuyers. The racial wealth gap is not an accident-it is a policy failure rooted in white supremacy and enshrined in biased policy mechanisms that punish low-income and Black communities.

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This article recognizes the root of what reparations are in the U.S. Its refreshing, because the article also acknowledges America stance on reparations in general. I personally admired that the article discussed how Japanese Americans, as well as Native Americans receive reparations for stolen land and internment camps that these people were forced to endure.

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Black voters are eligible for 14% of all votes and make a considerable difference. Half of eligible black voters live in one of eight states. Black voters account for 45% of the vote in the district of columbia higher than any other state.

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The number of Black eligible voters in the United States is projected to reach 34.4 million in November 2024 after several years of modest growth. And Black eligible voters stand out for turnout rates that are higher than among Latino and Asian eligible voters.

Black voters could play an important role in determining the outcome of key 2024 elections, including for U.S. president. In Georgia, a closely watched swing state, Black Americans account for a third of eligible voters.

In 2020, 92% of single-race Black, non-Hispanic voters cast a vote for Democrat Joe Biden, while only 8% backed Republican Donald Trump, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of validated voters.

Ahead of the 2024 presidential election, here are five key facts about Black eligible voters in the U.S., based on our own projections for 2024, as well as Census Bureau data for earlier years. (Eligible voters in this analysis are defined as citizens ages 18 and older residing in the 50 states and the District of Columbia. Not all eligible voters are actually registered to vote. Detailed demographic information about Black eligible voters is available in the drop-down box at the bottom of this post.)

Read other posts in this series

Black Americans are projected to account for 14.0% of eligible voters in the U.S. in November, according to Pew Research Center projections. The percentage of eligible voters who are Black has risen slowly in the past two decades. In 2012, for example, Black voters represented 13.2% of all eligible voters. In the last U.S. presidential election in 2020, they represented 13.5%.

At the same time, the number of Black eligible voters has grown steadily. Between 2020 and 2024, that number has grown by an estimated 7.1%, a slower rate than among Asian eligible voters (15.3%) or Hispanic eligible voters (12.1%).

As of 2022, about half of Black eligible voters live in one of eight states. Texas has the largest number, with 2.9 million, followed by Georgia and Florida (2.6 million each). Rounding out the top eight are New York (2.4 million), California (2.0 million), North Carolina (1.8 million), and Maryland and Illinois (1.4 million each). Together, these states account for 52% of Black eligible voters in the 50 states and the District of Columbia.

Black voters made up nearly half (45%) of all eligible voters in the District of Columbia in 2022, a higher share than in any state. Other places with large shares of Black eligible voters are Mississippi (37%), Georgia (33%), Maryland (33%) and Louisiana (32%).

Regionally, more than half of Black eligible voters (57%) live in Southern states. The Midwest (17%) and Northeast (16%) have the next-highest shares of the nation's Black eligible voters, while relatively few live in the West (10%).

About seven-in-ten Black people in the U.S. are eligible to vote, a higher share than among Hispanics and Asian Americans. Black Americans are more likely to be eligible to vote than some other groups because a high share are ages 18 and older (73%) and an even larger share are citizens (96%).

Nevertheless, the share of the Black population that is eligible to vote varies considerably by state. While 74% of all Black residents of Alabama, D.C. and South Carolina are eligible to vote, fewer than six-in-ten are eligible in Minnesota (55%), Utah (55%) and Iowa (53%).
Black eligible voters differ from the overall population of eligible voters by age, education and other factors.
Around one-in-four Black eligible voters (23%) have a bachelor's degree, lower than the share among all U.S. adults eligible to vote (33%). Another 34% of Black eligible voters have some college education or an associate degree. The remaining 43% have a high school diploma or less, compared with 36% of all eligible voters.

Black eligible voters are more likely than eligible voters to be women (53% vs. 51%). They also tend to be younger than eligible voters overall: 60% of Black eligible voters are under the age of 50, compared with 52% of all U.S. eligible voters.

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Key facts about Black eligible voters in 2024

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The number of Black eligible voters in the United States is projected to reach 34.4 million in November 2024 after several years of modest growth.

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Homeownership and high-quality affordable rental housing are critical tools for wealth building.An for financial well-being in the U.S

American lawmakers have always been trying to secure land for, reduce barriers to, and expand the wealth-building capacity.For property ownership and affordable rental housing.

But these efforts only really benefited white household.Often colored people have been removed from their homes and have denied access to wealth building opportunities.

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Part of a Series

In this article

Typical row home facades on a residential street off Germantown Avenue in Philadelphia on November 9, 2017. (Getty/Bastiaan Slabbers)

Authors' note: CAP uses "Black" and "African American" interchangeably throughout many of our products. We chose to capitalize "Black" in order to reflect that we are discussing a group of people and to be consistent with the capitalization of "African American."
Introduction and summary

Homeownership and high-quality affordable rental housing are critical tools for wealth building and financial well-being in the United States. Knowing this, American lawmakers have long sought to secure land for, reduce barriers to, and expand the wealth-building capacity of property ownership and affordable rental housing. But these efforts have almost exclusively benefited white households; often, they have removed people of color from their homes, denied them access to wealth-building opportunities, and relocated them to isolated communities. Across the country, historic and ongoing displacement, exclusion, and segregation continue to prevent people of color from obtaining and retaining their own homes and accessing safe, affordable housing.

For centuries, structural racism in the U.S. housing system has contributed to stark and persistent racial disparities in wealth and financial well-being, especially between Black and white households. In fact, these differences are so entrenched that if current trends continue, it could take more than 200 years for the average Black family to accumulate the same amount of wealth as its white counterparts. While homeownership and affordable housing are not a panacea for eliminating entrenched racial inequality, lawmakers must make amends for past and present harms by enacting new laws designed to expand access to prosperity for all Americans.

This report examines how government-sponsored displacement, exclusion, and segregation have exacerbated racial inequality in the United States. It first looks at how public policies have systematically removed people of color from their homes. It then considers how federal, state, and local policies have fortified housing discrimination. The final section of the report proposes targeted solutions that would help make the U.S. housing system more equitable.

American public policy systematically removes people of color from their homes and communities

In 1845, the term "manifest destiny" emerged to describe the commonly held belief that white settlement and expansion across North America was inevitable and even divinely ordained. But long before then, this ideology provided the justification for ethnic cleansing and systematic displacement. In many ways, it continues to inform policymaking to this day. This section considers examples within Native American and Black communities.

Displaced centuries ago, Native American communities continue to face disparities

Although American public policies had intentionally displaced people of color for centuries prior, two of the most well-known examples are the Indian Removal Act and the Dawes Act. President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act into law in 1830, authorizing the federal government to forcibly relocate Native Americans in the southeast in order to make room for white settlement. For the next two decades, thousands of Native Americans died of hunger, disease, and exhaustion on a forced march west of the Mississippi River-a march now known as the "Trail of Tears." Decades later, in 1887, President Grover Cleveland signed into law the General Allotment Act-better known as the Dawes Act. The Dawes Act forcibly converted communally held tribal lands into small, individually owned lots. The federal government then seized two-thirds of reservation lands and redistributed the land to white Americans. Native American families who were allotted land were encouraged to take up agriculture despite the fact that much of the land was unsuitable for farming and many could not afford the equipment, livestock, and other supplies necessary for a successful enterprise. The result was the erosion of tribal traditions, the displacement of thousands of families, and the loss of 90 million acres of valuable land.

But the systematic removal of Native Americans did not end in the 1800s: Between 1945 and 1968, federal laws terminated more than 100 tribal nations' recognition and placed them under state jurisdiction, contributing to the loss of millions of additional acres of tribal land. During this period, lawmakers again encouraged Native Americans to relocate-this time from reservations to urban centers, resulting in economic hardships and housing instability.

Centuries of displacement have destabilized Black communities and undermined their access to opportunity

American lawmakers have long touted the importance of property ownership, affordable housing, and economic development. However, policymaking has too often coincided with the systematic removal of people of color from their homes and communities. Historic and ongoing displacement has destabilized communities and exacerbated racial disparities in economic indicators of well-being. These government policies, combined with the exclusion and segregation discussed in the following section of this report, are causes and consequences of entrenched structural racism in the U.S. housing system.

Federal, state, and local policies have fortified housing discrimination

For decades, governments and private citizens have employed exclusionary tactics to prevent African Americans and other people of color from building wealth through homeownership and affordable housing. Whether through formal policy decisions or a persistent failure to enact and enforce civil rights laws, government action and inaction continues to undermine prosperity in communities of color.

Exclusion from federal homeownership programs undermined Black families' wealth accumulation in the 20th century

As noted in a recent Center for American Progress report, "Racial Disparities in Home Appreciation," the federal government established several programs in the 20th century that were designed to promote homeownership and provide a pathway to the middle class. However, these programs largely benefited white households while excluding Black families.

While federal intervention and investment has helped expand homeownership and affordable housing for countless white families, it has undermined wealth building in black communities.
Figure 2
In 1933 and 1934, in the midst of the Great Depression, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Home Owners' Loan Act and the National Housing Act into law to prevent foreclosures and make rental housing and homeownership more affordable. To carry out these missions, the newly minted Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) created maps to assess the risk of mortgage refinancing and set new standards for federal underwriting. The Federal Housing Administration (FHA) used these maps to determine the areas in which it would guarantee mortgages. But HOLC maps assessed risk in part based on a neighborhood's racial composition, designating predominantly nonwhite neighborhoods as hazardous, and coloring these areas red. This process, known as redlining, denied people of color-especially Black people-access to mortgage refinancing and federal underwriting opportunities while perpetuating the notion that residents of color were financially risky and a threat to local property values. As a result, just 2 percent of the $120 billion in FHA loans distributed between 1934 and 1962 were given to nonwhite families. Today, approximately 3 in 4 neighborhoods-74 percent-that the HOLC deemed "hazardous" in the 1930s remain low to moderate income, and more than 60 percent are predominantly nonwhite. In short, while federal intervention and investment has helped expand homeownership and affordable housing for countless white families, it has undermined wealth building in black communities.

Lawmakers have abdicated their responsibility to enact and fully enforce civil rights protections

For much of the 20th century households of color were systematically excluded from federal homeownership programs, and government officials largely stood by as predatory lenders stripped them of wealth and stability.

For much of the 20th century households of color were systematically excluded from federal homeownership programs.

In the decades preceding the Fair Housing Act, government policies led many white Americans to believe that residents of color were a threat to local property values. For example, real estate professionals across the country who sought to maximize profits by leveraging this fear convinced white homeowners that Black families were moving in nearby and offered to buy their homes at a discount. These "blockbusters" would then sell the properties to Black families-who had limited access to FHA loans or GI Bill benefits-at marked-up prices and interest rates. Moreover, these homes were often purchased on contracts, rather than traditional mortgages, allowing real estate professionals to evict Black families if they missed even one payment and then repeat the process with other Black families. During this period, in Chicago alone, more than 8 in 10 Black homes were purchased on contract rather than a standard mortgage, resulting in cumulative losses of up to $4 billion. Blockbusting and contract buying were just two of several discriminatory wealth-stripping practices that lawmakers permitted in the U.S. housing system.
Figure 4
People of color continue to endure rampant discrimination in the housing market: 17 percent of Native Americans, 25 percent of Asian Americans, 31 percent of Latinos, and 45 percent of African Americans report experiencing discrimination when trying to rent or buy housing. (see Figure 4) By contrast, just 5 percent of white Americans report experiencing housing discrimination. Racial bias not only undermines access to housing but can also affect property values. One study found that homes in Black neighborhoods were undervalued by an average of $48,000 due to racial bias, resulting in $156 billion in cumulative losses nationwide. Clearly, federal, state, and local lawmakers could do more to ensure that all Americans-regardless of background-have access to homeownership and affordable housing.

Racial segregation is the direct result of intentional government policy, not individual choice

More than 50 years after the Fair Housing Act's passage, most American communities remain segregated by race. Existing residential patterns are largely not the result of personal preference among people of color to live in ethnic enclaves, but rather centuries of policies enacted by lawmakers on every level. Racial segregation has contributed to persistent disparities in access to public goods-such as parks, hospitals, streetlights, and well-maintained roads-and has undermined wealth building in communities of color nationwide.

Long before redlining offered an economic incentive to segregate communities, local governments relied on, among other policies, zoning ordinances to keep races apart.

During this period, lawmakers also enacted policies to separate African Americans from white Americans. Long before redlining offered an economic incentive to segregate communities, local governments relied on, among other policies, zoning ordinances to keep races apart. Explicit race-based zoning emerged in 1910 with formal prohibitions on African Americans purchasing property on majority-white blocks, and vice versa. While the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed race-based zoning in 1917, its rationale-that the practice limited white homeowners' ability to sell their property-encouraged localities to develop innovative new segregation strategies.

Conclusion

Across the country, historic and ongoing displacement, exclusion, and segregation prevent people of color from obtaining and retaining homeownership, as well as accessing safe, affordable housing. Even when they succeed in purchasing their own homes, people of color-especially Black people-often experience lower returns on their investment. They are also more likely to experience foreclosure, often due to predatory lending practices. In addition, the cost of rental housing has outpaced wages and destabilized longtime residents' ability to afford their homes.

While homeownership and affordable rental housing are not panaceas for addressing entrenched structural inequality, it is clear that lawmakers must make amends for past and present harms inflicted on communities of color in the U.S. housing system. CAP has previously called on lawmakers to significantly expand the supply of affordable units and dismantle existing exclusionary zoning practices. These efforts must also coincide with policies that promote access to resources and opportunity among residents of color. Moreover, lawmakers should support robust civil rights enforcement in the housing market by fully implementing the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule, applying disparate impact assessments to housing discrimination cases, and modifying the mortgage appraisal process. Lawmakers should also reexamine current Federal Emergency Management Agency and disaster relief regulations to promote environmental justice and equitable recovery policies.

These policies will not make amends for centuries of injustice in the housing market; however, they would represent affirmative steps toward racial equity in the U.S. housing system.

About the authors

Danyelle Solomon is the vice president for Race and Ethnicity Policy at the Center for American Progress.

Connor Maxwell is a policy analyst for Race and Ethnicity Policy at the Center.

Abril Castro is a research assistant for Race and Ethnicity Policy at the Center.

Methodology

The authors used the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey (ACS) to measure racial disparities in self-reported homeownership. (see Figure 3, Figure A1, and Table A1) This analysis relied on data from the 2013-2017 ACS five-year estimates. Percentages were weighted to reflect population characteristics. In studying the relationship between race and self-reported homeownership, the authors controlled for educational attainment, income quintile, geographical region, marital status, age, and state. Differences in homeownership by race were significant at the 95 percent confidence level, and all estimates had relative standard errors of less than 20 percent.

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The United States must reckon with the racism built into its housing system in order to ensure that all Americans have the opportunity to build wealth.

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People argue that the current generation has nothing to do with what was done. "And then you're paying people that have nothing to do with it in the past. And some people feel "it's impossible to place a monetary value on the impact of slavery"

https://www.npr.org/2023/03/27/1164869576/cities-reparations-white-black-slavery-oppose#:~:text=The%20racial%20wealth%20gap%20challenges%20a%20core%20American%20narrative&text=But%20to%20try%20and%20make,with%20it%20in%20the%20past.%22

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Cities may be debating reparations, but here’s why most Americans oppose the idea

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Compensation for descendants of enslaved people is broadly controversial, and especially so among whites and Republicans. Researchers say one reason may be misperceptions about the racial wealth gap.

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-Today, there are over 100 HBCUs. These institutions range from public and private, to four-year and two-year community colleges. HBCUs offer associate, bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees.

-HBCUs provided Black people the opportunity to get a higher education. The majority of white institutions denied Black applicants solely based on their skin color.

-There are a number of HBCUs with open admissions policies allowing students who struggled in high school or who come from low-income families the chance to attend college.

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Historically Black colleges and universities have played a significant role in providing accessible and equitable education to Black people in the United States.

Historically Black colleges and universities graduate low-income students at higher rates.

HBCUs are credited with creating the Black middle class.

The number of non-Black students attending HBCUs has been increasing for the past four years.

Despite funding issues, HBCUs continue to see a rise in enrollment.

Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) have played a significant role in American history for well over a century. The list of notable HBCU alumni is long and includes the likes of Thurgood Marshall, the first Black Supreme Court Justice, and Kamala Harris, the first Black vice president of the United States.

According to a report by the United Negro College Fund (UNCF), HBCUs make up only 3% of higher education institutions in the United States, yet they enroll 10% of all Black students, making them an essential part of the higher education landscape.

The History of Historically Black Colleges and Universities

Historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) are defined as institutions established before 1964 with the mission of educating Black people since they were denied admission to white institutions. The first HBCU was Cheyney University of Pennsylvania, established by the Quakers in 1837, with the goal of preparing free people of African descent to become teachers. In 1854, Ashman Institute - later renamed Lincoln University - became the first HBCU to actually grant degrees.

Wilberforce University in Ohio opened its doors in 1856 as the first HBCU to be owned and operated by Black people under the leadership of the African Methodist Episcopal Church.

Today, there are over 100 HBCUs. These institutions range from public and private, to four-year and two-year community colleges. HBCUs offer associate, bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees. You can also earn professional degrees at HBCUs in fields such as criminal justice, medicine, and veterinary science.

HBCUs' Role in Closing the Racial Wealth Gap

Historically Black colleges and universities are credited with creating the Black middle class. According to the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, HBCUs produced 40% of all Black members of Congress, 40% of Black engineers, 50% of Black lawyers, and 80% of Black judges.

Additionally, 70% of Black doctors in the United States attended an HBCU. In terms of financial earnings, a report by the UNCF also found that graduates of HBCUs can expect to earn an additional $927,000 in their lifetime - 56% more than they would earn without a college degree.

Why Are HBCUs Still Important?

Founded during an era when the U.S. did not consider Black people citizens by law, upheld their ongoing oppression and discrimination, and denied them basic civil rights, HBCUs provided Black people the opportunity to get a higher education. The majority of white institutions denied Black applicants solely based on their skin color.

If it were not for HBCUs, many Black students would not have the opportunity to attend college. There are a number of HBCUs with open admissions policies, allowing students who struggled in high school or who come from low-income families the chance to attend college. HBCUs create a space where students of all socio-economic backgrounds can feel welcomed and thrive.

Admissions at HBCUs Today

According to the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES), enrollment at HBCUs is up by 57%, with a 30% increase in applications over the last four years. While HBCUs have always been poised as being welcoming educational environments for Black students, they have also attracted non-Black students because of their locations, scholarship offerings, affordability, academic programs, and sports.

In 2022, non-Black enrollment at HBCUs was 24%, with 11% White students, 8% Latino/a students, and 2% American Indian or Asian students. About 2.5% of those enrolled at HBCUs are international students, mainly from Africa and the Caribbean.

Funding Disparities That HBCUs Face

HBCUs have faced funding disparities since their inception. After an investigation by Forbes, The Department of Education recently revealed that 16 land grant HBCUs were underfunded by $13 billion over the last 30 years by their respective states, while predominantly white land grant institutions received adequate funding.

This prompted the Secretary of Education and the Secretary of Agriculture to send letters to the governors of these states, directing them to make the corrections over the course of several years or commit to a substantial allocation. Though federal funding, corporate donations, and alumni donations help colleges financially, state funds make a major difference in how institutions can help their students. Adequate funding can make a significant impact on academic programs, student services, scholarship offerings, and technology and infrastructure upgrades.

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The Role and Legacy of HBCUs in Higher Education | BestColleges

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Historically Black colleges and universities have played a significant role in providing accessible and equitable education to Black people in the United States.

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HBCUs are attractive to students because they offer a supportive community, celebrate culture, provide a good education, and are affordable compared to other colleges.

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Historically Black colleges and universities or also know as HBCU'S are institutions that were introduced prior to 1964 and were made to educate black people.They have flourished because there is alot of black african-americans that want to be succesful and it is open environment for specifically colored people to flourish and have higher education and a higher status in the world.For hbcu's black people are looked at first to get enrolled and then other ethnicities and female enrollment has been higher than male voting since 1976

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Historically Black Colleges and Universities

Question:
What data do you have on historically Black colleges and universities in the United States?

Historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) are institutions that were established prior to 1964 with the principal mission of educating Black Americans ( source). These institutions were founded and developed in an environment of legal segregation and, by providing access to higher education, they contributed substantially to the progress Black Americans made in improving their status ( source).

In 2022, there were 99 HBCUs located in 19 states, the District of Columbia, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Of the 99 HBCUs, 50 were public institutions and 49 were private nonprofit institutions ( source). The number of HBCU students increased by 47 percent (from 223,000 to 327,000 students) between 1976 and 2010, then decreased by 11 percent (to 289,000 students) between 2010 and 2022 ( source). However, the number of HBCU students was about the same in 2022 as it was just prior to the coronavirus pandemic in 2019 (also rounded to 289,000 students). In comparison, the number of students in all degree-granting institutions increased 91 percent (from 11.0 million to 21.0 million students) between 1976 and 2010, then decreased 12 percent (to 18.6 million students) between 2010 and 2022 ( source).

Although HBCUs were originally founded to educate Black students, they enroll students of other races as well. The composition of HBCUs has changed over time. In 2022, non-Black students made up 24 percent of enrollment at HBCUs, compared with 15 percent in 1976 ( source).

Black enrollment at HBCUs fluctuated between 1976 and 2022, with a peak in 2010 (266,000 students). Meanwhile, the total number of Black students enrolled in all degree-granting postsecondary institutions (both HBCUs and non-HBCUs) was more than twice as high in 2022 as in 1976, despite annual declines since its peak in 2011 (3.1 million students), including throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. In contrast, although Black enrollment in HBCUs fell from 219,000 in 2019 to 212,000 in 2020, it rebounded to 219,000 in 2022. As a result, the percentage of Black students enrolled at HBCUs fell from 18 percent in 1976 to a low of 8 percent in 2014, then rose to 9 percent, where it has remained through 2022 ( source, source, and source).

Female enrollment at HBCUs has been higher than male enrollment in every year since 1976. The percentage of female enrollment at HBCUs increased from 53 percent in 1976 to 64 percent in 2022. Also in 2022, some 88 percent of HBCU students attended 4-year institutions, while the remaining 12 percent attended 2-year institutions. About 77 percent of HBCU students attended public institutions, while the remaining 23 percent attended private nonprofit institutions ( source).

In academic year 2021-22, some 48,800 degrees were conferred by HBCUs: 11 percent were associate's degrees, about two-thirds were bachelor's degrees (67 percent), 16 percent were master's degrees, and 6 percent were doctor's degrees. Of the degrees conferred by HBCUs, the majority (74 percent) were conferred to Black students. Black students earned 44 percent of the 5,300 associate's degrees, 81 percent of the 32,800 bachelor's degrees, 70 percent of the 7,600 master's degrees, and 61 percent of the 3,000 doctor's degrees conferred by HBCUs in 2021-22. Of all degrees conferred by HBCUs to Black students, more than two-thirds were conferred to female students (69 percent) ( source).

Of all the bachelor's and master's degrees conferred to Black students, the percentage conferred by HBCUs has decreased over time. For example, HBCUs conferred 35 percent of the bachelor's degrees and 21 percent of the master's degrees Black students earned in 1976-77, compared with 13 and 5 percent, respectively, in 2021-22 ( source, source, source, and source). Additionally, the percentage of Black doctor's degree recipients who received their degrees from HBCUs was lower in 2021-22 (10 percent) than in 1976-77 (14 percent) ( source, source, and source).

The total revenue for HBCUs in 2021-22 was $10.7 billion, with $1.9 billion from student tuition and fees. Total expenditures were $9.9 billion, of which $2.3 billion was spent on instruction ( source).

Ninety percent of all undergraduate students at HBCUs received some type of financial aid in 2019-20. Specifically, 83 percent received grants, 65 percent took out student loans, 4 percent received work-study awards, 2 percent received federal veterans education benefits, and 18 percent had parents who took out federal Direct PLUS Loans ( source).

Among undergraduates at HBCUs who received any financial aid in 2019-20, the average total amount received was $17,300. The average amount received from grants was $9,200, and the average amount received from loans directly to students was $7,700 ( source).

Student financial aid comes from federal, state, and institutional sources. Among undergraduates at HBCUs in 2019-20, 82 percent received federal aid, 27 percent received state aid, and 35 percent received institution aid ( source). The average amounts for students receiving financial aid from these sources were $13,200, $3,400, and $6,400, respectively ( source).

Data come from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS). Prior to 2010, IPEDS required institutions to report all students as belonging to a single racial/ethnic group (i.e., White, Black, Hispanic, Asian, and American Indian/Alaska Native). From 1992 to 2009, under this single-choice design, the percentage of non-Black students fluctuated between 17 and 18 percent. Beginning in 2010, IPEDS asks institutions to separately report students of single racial/ethnic backgrounds and those of two or more races. Since this reporting change, students reported as Two or more races have been included in the percentage of non-Black students. Although students reported as Two or more races may be Black (and another race), it is not possible to determine that with the available data.
Aid includes all types of financial aid from any source except parents, friends, or relatives. Direct PLUS Loans to parents and other types of aid such as veterans benefits and job training funds are included, but federal tax credits for education are not included. Aid does not include emergency aid related to COVID-19.
Grants include grants, scholarships, or tuition waivers from federal, state, institution, or private sources, including employers.
Student loans include only loans directly to students and may be from federal, state, institution, or private sources. Student loans do not include Direct PLUS Loans to parents or other forms of financing such as credit cards, home equity loans, or loans from individuals.
Work-study includes federal, state, and institution work-study.
Federal veterans education benefits include benefits to dependents. Amounts are based on Veterans Benefits Administration data. Interpret this estimate with caution. It is unstable, or less precise, because the standard error is more than 30 percent but less than 50 percent of the estimate.

Related Tables and Figures: (Listed by Release Date)

2024, Digest of Education Statistics 2023, Table 302.20. Percentage of recent high school completers enrolled in college, by race/ethnicity and level of institution: 1960 through 2022

2024, Digest of Education Statistics 2023, Table 302.60. Percentage of 18- to 24-year-olds enrolled in college, by level of institution and sex and race/ethnicity of student: 1970 through 2022

2024, Digest of Education Statistics 2023, Table 306.10. Total fall enrollment in degree-granting postsecondary institutions, by level of enrollment, sex, attendance status, and race/ethnicity or nonresident status of student: Selected years, 1976 through 2022

2024, Digest of Education Statistics 2023, Table 318.45. No. & % distribution of STEM degrees/certificates conferred by postsecondary institutions, by race/ethnicity, level of degree/certificate, & sex of student: Academic years 2012-13 through 2021-22

Other Resources: (Listed by Release Date)

2024, White House Initiative on Historically Black Colleges and Universities

2022, NCES Blog: Research Roundup: NCES Celebrates Black History Month

2019, Status and Trends in the Education of Racial and Ethnic Groups 2018

2016, First-Time Postsecondary Students in 2011–12: A Profile

2012, Higher Education: Gaps in Access and Persistence Study

2007, Characteristics of Minority-Serving Institutions and Minority Undergraduates Enrolled in These Institutions

2006, Economic Impact of the Nation's Historically Black Colleges and Universities

2004, Historically Black Colleges and Universities, 1976 to 2001

1985, The Traditionally Black Institutions of Higher Education 1860 to 1982

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education statistics questions and answers

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Fast Facts: Historically Black Colleges and Universities (667)

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The NCES Fast Facts Tool provides quick answers to many education questions (National Center for Education Statistics). Get answers on Early Childhood Education, Elementary and Secondary Education and Higher Education here.

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Reparations are meant to acknowledge and repair the causes and consequences of human rights violations and inequality in countries. Defeating countries forcing them to pay for the wars winning cost. Some would have different opinions of paying, the impact, and racial inequality.

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Reparations are meant to acknowledge and repair the causes and consequences of human rights violations and inequality in countries. Defeating countries forcing them to pay for the wars winning cost. Some would have different opinions of paying, the impact, and racial inequality.

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Calls for Britain to pay reparations for its role in the transatlantic slave trade were renewed in Jamaica, Belize and the Bahamas during the recent tour of the countries by the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge.

The royal couple's trip was marred by protests and a string of PR failures, as black and indigenous groups across the Caribbean nations came together as "part of a collective push for slavery reparations" to be paid by Britain, reported The Independent.

The tour has once again stirred up debate over whether rich countries that benefited financially from slavery should pay compensation to affected nations or the descendants of enslaved peoples. The campaign for slavery reparations has gained momentum in many parts of the world, including in the US, in the wake of 2020 Black Lives Matter protests.

1. For: the moral imperative

For many campaigners, the question of whether reparations should be paid hinges on a moral argument that amends must be made for hundreds of years of unpaid labour and brutal exploitation.

Nora Blake, of the human rights coalition Advocates Network and the co-organiser of a protest against the royal visit to Jamaica, told The Independent: "It is important as we turn 60 years old as an independent nation that we stand as 'adults' on solid ethical, moral and human justice grounds to say to Britain, who was once our 'parent', that you have done wrong in enriching yourselves off of chattel slavery and colonialism."

The payment of reparations is "not so much about money" as "confronting those responsible with their wrongdoing and getting them to recognise the value of their victims as human beings", Luke Moffett, a senior law lecturer at Queen's University Belfast, wrote for The Conversation.

The role of reparations in making amends for slavery and its generational impact was also highlighted by UN human rights chief Michelle Bachelet in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, which sparked mass protests around the world.

"Behind today's racial violence, systemic racism and discriminatory policing lies the failure to acknowledge and confront the legacy of the slave trade and colonialism," she said in an urgent debate on racism and police brutality in 2020.

In her address, Bachelet stressed the need to "make amends for centuries of violence and discrimination, including through formal apologies, truth-telling processes, and reparations in various forms", The Guardian reported.

2. Against: the question of who to pay

Many have argued that the paying of reparations is complicated by the fact that people directly harmed by slavery, including their direct descendants, are no longer alive.

A recent petition in 2021 from the Jamaican government seeking up to £7bn in reparations for Britain's role in the transatlantic slave trade was dismissed by the British High Commission on this basis. Asif Ahmad, the British high commissioner in Jamaica, told The Gleaner: "When it comes to this direct request for reparations from government to government, the reason why it will not prosper is because who do we pay it to?

"The people who were harmed directly are no longer here," he said.

To date, the UK government has only paid compensation to living people, Ahmad said, using the Windrush Compensation Scheme as an example. Instead, he suggested better education about the history of slavery and better development and assistance for countries in the Caribbean.

Bayard Rustin, a friend of Martin Luther King Jr, told The New York Times in 1969: "If my great-grandfather picked cotton for 50 years, then he may deserve some money, but he's dead and gone and nobody owes me anything."

3. For: easing impact on descendants

Many supporters of transatlantic slavery reparations make the point that slave owners were given substantial compensation as part of the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, which ended legal slavery in Britain.

Compensation worth between £16bn and £17bn in modern terms was given to some 46,000 British slave owners, a sum which represented "40% of the total government expenditure for 1834", said historian and broadcaster David Olusoga in The Observer in 2015. Freed slaves received nothing, which campaigners have called unjust.

Writing in The Guardian in 2017, British academic and writer Kehinde Andrews argued that the wealth of Western nations is built on "racism" and the "enslavement of millions of African people and the conquest of the world by European powers".

It is "the height of delusion" to think that the impact of slavery ended with the emancipation of slaves, said Andrews, arguing that "descendants of enslaved Africans in the west find themselves subject to steep racial inequalities in every area of social life" and that racial equality can only occur with "nothing short of a massive transfer of wealth from the developed to the underdeveloped world, and to the descendants of slavery and colonialism in the west".

Some reject the hypothesis that all of the Caribbean experiences abject poverty, however. According to The Economist, "most slave colonies in the Caribbean are now fairly successful middle-income countries, or better... the Bahamas has a GDP per head close to that of Italy or Spain. Barbados scores higher on the UN Development Programme's human development index than any of its much larger South American neighbours".

Any assistance to the region, therefore, should be "carefully targeted" and should "surely stem from today's needs, not the wrongs of the past", said the newspaper.

4. Against: addressing racial inequality

Former Tory minister Rory Stewart told Time magazine in 2019 that UK aid should be targeted to help "the poorest people in the world", rather than paying reparations in "some weird belief that we're going to somehow undo 300, 400 years of colonial history by writing cheques to people".

There are also some who argue that the idea of reparations is insulting or patronising, and perpetuates a narrative of "victimhood". For example, Coleman Hughes, an undergraduate philosophy major at Columbia University, testified at a 2019 US Congressional hearing, arguing that reparations "by definition, are only given to victims.

"So the moment you give me reparations, you've made me into a victim without my consent," he told the hearing. "Not just that, you've made one-third of black Americans who poll against reparations into victims without their consent. And black Americans have fought too long for the right to define themselves to be spoken for in such a condescending manner."

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The arguments for and against slavery reparations

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Calls for Britain to pay compensation for slavery have gained momentum in recent years

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Many people of color do not like Confederate monuments because they feel like the US is still choosing to celebrate a negative part of the country's history. But some people on the other side of things like to argue it's not celebrating racism and the things that happened as a product of confederate but they are just highlighting their heritage. Having Confederate monuments and symbols is like having nazi symbols just because it's a part of your history doesn't mean it has to be celebrated.

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T he Civil War ended 154 years ago. The Confederacy, as former New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu has said, was on the wrong side of humanity.
Our public entities should no longer play a role in distorting history by honoring a secessionist government that waged war against the United States to preserve white supremacy and the enslavement of millions of people. It's past time for the South - and the rest of the nation - to bury the myth of the Lost Cause once and for all.
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As of February 1, 2019, the data set, map, and online report are up to date as reported to and vetted by the SPLC. That data is available to download for research and exploration.
DOWNLOAD THE DATA Learn more about how communities are dismantling a whitewashed history of the Confederacy and sparking a reckoning with the truth about its cruel legacy by listening to the SPLC's podcast, Sounds Like Hate.
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The 2015 massacre of nine African Americans at the historic "Mother Emanuel" church in Charleston, South Carolina, sparked a nationwide movement to remove Confederate monuments, flags and other symbols from the public square, and to rename schools, parks, roads and other public works that pay homage to the Confederacy.

Yet, today, the vast majority of these emblems remain in place.

In this updated edition of the 2016 report Whose Heritage?, the SPLC identifies 114 Confederate symbols that have been removed since the Charleston attack - and 1,747 that still stand.

Many of these monuments are protected by state laws in the former Confederate states.

Others are shielded by civic leaders who refuse to act in the face of a strong backlash by white Southerners who are still enthralled by the myth of the "Lost Cause" and the revisionist history that these monuments represent.

White supremacists have also taken up the cause, staging hundreds of rallies across the country to protest monument removals. We saw a dramatic display of their anger in August 2017 when hundreds of racists marched with torches and shouted Nazi slogans in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a young, anti-racist counterprotester was killed.

President Donald Trump has sided with those who want to continue honoring the Confederacy, calling the removal of "beautiful" monuments "foolish" and tweeting that it is "[s]ad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart."

In New Orleans, a multicultural city steeped in Southern history, the political leadership took the opposite tack. In 2017, then-Mayor Mitch Landrieu powerfully defended the city's removal of three prominent monuments and denounced the "false narrative" promoted by the "Cult of the Lost Cause." That cult, he said, "had one goal - through monuments and through other means - to rewrite history to hide the truth, which is that the Confederacy was on the wrong side of humanity."

We encourage communities across the country to reflect on the true meaning of these symbols and ask the question: Whose heritage do they truly represent?

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Whose Heritage? Public Symbols of the Confederacy

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Our public entities should no longer play a role in distorting history by honoring a secessionist government that waged war against the United States to preserve white supremacy and the enslavement of millions of people. It's past time for the South - and the rest of the nation - to bury the myth of the Lost Cause once and for all.

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In 2023 49 monuments were removed while hundreds of names and monuments are set to be removed by january 2024.

She continued, "Another real goal was to claim white spaces. A lot of these memorials are put up in front of courthouses to claim the law as something that is only for whites. After Brown v. the Board of Education made segregation illegal, many schools suddenly changed their names to the names of Confederates, making a clear statement that no matter what the law says, these schools are white spaces

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More than 60 years after Martin Luther King Jr. uttered 'Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia,' racial and historical tensions continue to boil over at Stone Mountain, which doubles as the home of the largest Confederate monument in the world and the Ku Klux Klan's 20th-century rebirth.

The Confederate monument etched into the mountain is larger than Mount Rushmore, according to the Atlanta History Center. The carving honors three Confederate figures in the Civil War -- Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate states, and Generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson.

Stone Mountain is one of more than 2,000 Confederate memorials still in place across the country, according to the legal advocacy group Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). This list includes monuments, plaques, street and building names, and more.

The Confederate Memorial Carving at Stone Mountain Park on October 15, 2022, in Stone Mountain, Georgia.

Elijah Nouvelage/AFP via Getty Images

In 2023, about 49 memorials were removed, including nine Department of Defense forts that have been renamed, according to the SPLC.

According to a Congressional Naming Commission Report, hundreds of Confederate monuments -- including names, symbols, monuments, and paraphernalia -- honoring figures on Department of Defense land alone were set to be removed by January 2024.

This includes the controversial Reconciliation Monument at the Arlington National Cemetery that the cemetery said promotes "a nostalgic, mythologized vision of the Confederacy, including highly sanitized depictions of slavery." Monument removals or changes -- like the Reconciliation Monument and changes at Stone Mountain -- have prompted legal threats and challenges from Confederate heritage groups.

This represents a growing, concerted effort to remove Confederate monuments from public spaces. Critics say these memorials distort history and praise the Confederate fight in favor of slavery.

"These memorials serve the purpose of rewriting history, telling a different story of that war and remaking Confederate heroes as American heroes," said SPLC historian Rivka Maizlish. "You can imagine the psychological impact, especially on African Americans, but on anyone who does not believe that white supremacy is an American value, and seeing these memorials all over the country."

She continued, "Another real goal was to claim white spaces. A lot of these memorials are put up in front of courthouses to claim the law as something that is only for whites. After Brown v. the Board of Education made segregation illegal, many schools suddenly changed their names to the names of Confederates, making a clear statement that no matter what the law says, these schools are white spaces."

Workers dismantle the Confederate Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery December 20, 2023, in Arlington, Virginia.

Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images

There has simultaneously been a fight to preserve these spaces, specifically for those whose ancestors played a role in the Confederate Army and who say that removing these statues removes a piece of their heritage.

Martin O'Toole, of the Georgia branch of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, told ABC News that at least two of his ancestors fought under Jackson in the war.

"Stone Mountain is intended to be a memorial to the sacrifices of the people of Georgia, in particular, but the South in general in the establishment of a southern Republic, and then the sacrifices that were made were tremendous," said O'Toole.

He continued, "When this current upsurge of destruction of monuments, historical monuments and the like took place, then many of the members became convinced that our charge that we got from General Steven D. Lee ... required that we do something in the legal realm to defend these monuments."

Stone Mountain and the surrounding park are just one of the spaces at the center of controversy.

The park is lined with streets named after Confederate soldiers and Confederate flags waving on its lawns, with the large Confederate rock etchings as their backdrop. Stone Mountain, the city at the base of the park, is a predominantly Black community, according to the U.S. Census.

The park was also the site of the reemergence of the white supremacist group the Ku Klux Klan in 1915 amid the national success of the controversial Civil War epic film "The Birth of a Nation," according to the Atlanta History Center.

Before the film came to Atlanta, several men walked up Stone Mountain and set fire to a cross to symbolically resurrect the group -- which would later host Klan rallies, member initiations and more for decades, the Atlanta History Center reports.

Much of this memorial is protected by old Georgia law, which states that the memorial must be maintained as "an appropriate and suitable memorial for the Confederacy."

"The memorial to the heroes of the Confederate States of America graven upon the face of Stone Mountain shall never be altered, removed, concealed, or obscured in any fashion and shall be preserved and protected for all time as a tribute to the bravery and heroism of the citizens of this state who suffered and died in their cause," read state code on the memorial.

This has made discussion over park changes more difficult.

Those against the Confederate monument, including history teacher Sally Stanhope of the Stone Mountain Action Committee, say they are calling for an end to the upkeep of the monument, to allow it to grow over with biomass. They also say slavery is not mentioned in the signage and historical displays around the park.

However, a museum -- dubbed by park officials as a "truth-telling museum" -- will address some of these issues. ABC affiliate station WSB-TV in Atlanta reports that the museum will cover the racist past of the monument, including the KKK's resurgence and the monument's symbolic origins.

The state has dedicated $11 million for the museum's construction in a building that also houses the current Stone Mountain Museum, according to WSB-TV. It's expected to take two years to complete.

O'Toole said that because of these laws, the Sons of Confederate Veterans have threatened the state of Georgia with legal actions over changes that have been proposed, as well as those that have been made at Stone Mountain. This includes changes that have been made to put the park's Confederate flags in a more inconspicuous area.

O'Toole said the group has filed an ante litem notice in anticipation of a lawsuit, arguing that the changes are unlawful.

"They want to have it sort of basically turned into a civil rights playground," said O'Toole. "We take the position that they need to obey the law ... If they want to change things, they need to change the law."

Dr Martin Luther King Jr gives his "I Have a Dream" speech to a crowd before the Lincoln Memorial during the Freedom March in Washington, DC, on August 28, 1963.

Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

Mayor Beverly Jones, the first Black female mayor of Stone Mountain, has already faced backlash for making several changes around the park -- this includes renaming streets that honored Confederate figures.

She said she sees these monuments as a glorification of dark aspects of life for Black Americans.

"We don't ever want to have any cities to have monuments children have to look at every day and feel like '[Confederate figures] were powerful and you know, this is someone to look up to.' We don't want that to ever happen in the city of Stone Mountain."

She said that while speaking to high school students who live in the city of Stone Mountain, they told her they never visited.

"They talked about the Klan and they still had this image that they were walking to this area that they have their rallies at," Jones told ABC News in an interview.

She hopes an MLK Day march on Monday at Stone Mountain can bring attention to the ideals of freedom and King's cause which he advocated for in his 1963 'I Have a Dream' speech.

Rev. Abraham Mosley, appointed to his position as chairman of the Stone Mountain Memorial Association, is at the center of the back-and-forth discussions between the two sides.

He was born and raised in Georgia, but said he has no personal connection to the mountain: "I'm a Black person and it was a place in the past -- way back in the past -- that a Black person wasn't seen around," he said.

He continued, "It's a lot different now from what it was back then. And we're still improving."

However, a football-field-size rock etching is much more difficult to remove than an honorary plaque or a statue, said Mosley.

"Those problems and things that are on that mountain, they didn't show up overnight and they're not gonna go away overnight," said Mosley. "So that's gonna take some time to try to come to some common ground with everybody."

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Confederate monuments spark debate about history

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Confederate monuments continue to spark controversy. Over 2,000 Confederate memorials are still in place across the country, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

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This article highlights the unity that students experience at HBCU's. Today HBCU's uphold old traditions, and majority of students are black. In recent years (2018-2021) a influx of high school students applied to HBCU's through common app. HBCU's a re wonderful spaces for students to find themselves, and learn about the African Diaspora.

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Many in a generation that grew up with a Black president and Black Lives Matter are embracing Black colleges and universities.

Credit...Adraint Bereal for The New York Times

Published June 11, 2022 Updated June 17, 2022

Listen to This Article

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SeKai Parker looked on last spring as her prep school classmates tearfully embraced and belted out in unison every word of a Kelly Clarkson song.

It was the senior farewell at Holton-Arms in Bethesda, Md., and many of the teens were making college plans that would have them trading one elite, mostly white setting for another. Ms. Parker intended to accept an offer from Yale, which she had fallen in love with on a recent visit. But as she scanned her school auditorium, a familiar sinking feeling washed over her.

“I was sitting there by myself, I didn’t know a single word and I had no one to hold onto,” she recalled.

After school that day, she rushed out to meet her mother and made a life-changing declaration: I’m going to Spelman.

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Credit...Adraint Bereal for The New York Times

Choosing the historically Black women’s college in Atlanta was surprising for a student who had been determined to reach the Ivy League. Yale was one of 16 institutions, including three Ivies, competing for her to enroll.

But her decision reflects a renaissance in recent years among the nation’s historically Black colleges and universities, where their nurturing mission, increased funding and growing visibility have been drawing a new wave of students.

Once the primary means for Black Americans to get a college education, historically Black colleges and universities, or H.B.C.U.s, now account for just 9 percent of such students. But top-tier H.B.C.U.s — long bastions of Black excellence — as well as others are increasingly becoming the first choice for some of the nation’s most sought-after talent, according to interviews with dozens of students, guidance counselors, admissions advisers and college officials across the country.

They belong to a generation whose adolescence was shaped not only by the election of the first Black president but also by political and social strife that threatened the lives and liberties of Black Americans. For many families, the embrace of historically Black colleges has been influenced by concerns about racial hostility, students’ feelings of isolation in predominantly white schools and shifting views on what constitutes the pinnacle of higher education.

“College is the time when you’re trying to figure out who you are,” Ms. Parker said in an interview. “It’s impossible to figure that out in a space where you not only feel like you have to assimilate to fit into that space, when they didn’t invite you there or they tolerate you there, but you have to prove that your existence has value.”

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Credit...Photographs by Adraint Bereal for The New York Times

In the past few years, the nation’s H.B.C.U.s have experienced a boom. From 2018 to 2021, for example, applications for a cross section of Black schools increased nearly 30 percent, according to the Common App, a platform for students to submit one application to multiple colleges, outpacing the increases of many other schools. Submissions using the Common Black College Application, solely for H.B.C.U.s., are projected to reach 40,000 this year, quadruple the total in 2016. And enrollment has soared at some of the schools, even as it declined nationally.

There is also a growing recognition among policymakers and predominantly white schools of the value of H.B.C.U.s, and the fact that they have long operated at a disadvantage. Federal lawmakers have increased funding for the 101 schools, providing nearly $2 billion since 2017, as well as $2.7 billion this year in pandemic emergency relief. Alumni and philanthropists have donated over a billion dollars in recent years, funding scholarships and programs in science, technology and other fields. In April, Harvard, acknowledging that it had directly benefited from slavery in its early years, announced a faculty and student exchange program with H.B.C.U.s; Princeton soon after unveiled plans for research partnerships with some of the schools.

The groundswell of support has been unparalleled, said Lodriguez Murray, a senior vice president for the United Negro College Fund, the largest private scholarship provider for minority students and the leading advocacy organization for H.B.C.U.s.

“We say this is a renaissance for H.B.C.U.s, but the level of clout and capital the institutions have now is unprecedented,” Mr. Murray said, adding, “Frankly, it is about time.”

Lisa Fuller, the owner of College Primed, a college advising firm, noticed the new surge of interest in the schools around 2015, as protests erupted in the streets and on college campuses, when many more parents requested that she add H.B.C.U.s to their children’s lists of college applications.

“Families started to look and be introspective about ‘Where are we sending our kids?’ and started to search for safe havens,” she said. “Students asked, ‘Do I go somewhere where it’s sink or swim, or do I go somewhere where everybody’s swimming with me?’”

When it came time for her son to apply to colleges, Dr. Makunda Abdul-Mbacke thought it was settled: She had gone to Yale as an undergraduate and medical student, and earned a master’s in public health from Harvard. Her son, Khadim Mbacke, was on the radar of Ivy League and other highly selective schools.

“When we talked about what schools we were interested in, he said he wanted to look at Morehouse and Howard, and I was like, ‘What?’” she recalled.

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Credit...Adraint Bereal for The New York Times

She had imagined him in New Haven, eating in the same dining halls and studying in the same classrooms she had. But she realized how different his experience as a Black male today would be from hers as a young woman in the 1970s, when hard-won gains of the Civil Rights movement were taking hold.

Mr. Mbacke was 16 when neo-Nazis rallied in Charlottesville in August 2017, marching with torches on the University of Virginia, a school he was considering. Violence broke out the next day, leaving one woman dead. At his rural Virginia high school, he noticed overwhelmingly white enrollment in advanced placement courses. “One of the main things was that to be Black and smart, for some reason they tried to make it like those two things couldn’t coexist,” he said.

Then in 2019, a tour guide at the University of Pittsburgh pointed out a blue light emergency alarm system for students to summon security. The beacon was supposed to symbolize safety. For Mr. Mbacke, though, it conjured thoughts of a different outcome should his towering presence on campus ever be seen as a threat. “He’s 6-foot-3,” his mother said. “That’s the description of every Black man they put on the news.”

But after seeing Morehouse College in Atlanta, he was beaming, she recalled.

“His coming-of-age has been Mike Brown and Trayvon Martin and all the litany of young Black men that looked like him that have been killed too soon and taken away from their mothers and their families,” Dr. Abdul-Mbacke said. “There’s no golden key, no golden ticket when you’re Black in America,” she added. “You’re going to have to work hard, and if you can have a fair chance then you go for it. And he found that space.”

The Missouri Effect

America’s first Black college, called the African Institute, was opened in Philadelphia in 1837 by a Quaker philanthropist. Later renamed Cheyney University, it had a mission to train teachers and prepare workers for trades. After the Civil War, dozens of such schools for the formerly enslaved and their children began to populate the southern states, sustained by federal land grants, freedmen’s societies, churches and benefactors.

Over their history, H.B.C.U.s have educated most of the nation’s Black judges, half of its Black doctors and 40 percent of the Black members of Congress, as well as the current vice president, Kamala Harris. Though the schools — from research institutions to two-year programs — make up only 3 percent of the country’s colleges and universities, they produce 13 percent of all African American graduates, according to the United Negro College Fund.

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Credit...Frances Benjamin Johnston photograph collection, via Library of Congress

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Credit...Associated Press

Still, over the past half-century many Black students were drawn to predominantly white colleges and universities, which heavily recruited as they integrated, offering financial incentives and better resources.

That led to eroding enrollment at H.B.C.U.s — 279,000 students as of 2020, the most recent data available — and a perception, even in the Black community, that they were a second-rate option. “We had to our great detriment, and perhaps even our peril, accepted the narrative, ‘white is right,’” said Roslyn Artis, president of Benedict College in Columbia, S.C.

But in recent years, she said, the schools have been widely recognized for what they have always done: “punch above their weight.”

That attitude shift began in part because of the “Missouri Effect,” a term coined in 2016 by Walter Kimbrough, president of Dillard University, a private liberal arts H.B.C.U. in Louisiana. In 2015, students at the University of Missouri led monthslong demonstrations over a series of racist incidents on campus, ultimately forcing the university system’s president and the chancellor of the Columbia campus to resign.

Across the country, Dr. Kimbrough said, Black students began demanding better conditions and treatment at predominantly white institutions, and others began to reject them altogether.

Data showing how many students are applying only to H.B.C.U.s or have turned down majority-white schools in favor of historically Black schools is not available. Just as the most selective H.B.C.U.s are drawing more applicants, so are some of the nation’s other schools. The dean of undergraduate admissions at Yale, for instance, said the school had a record level of Black freshman enrollment the year Ms. Parker declined. The dean, Jeremiah Quinlan, said he knew of one other Black student admitted last year who had opted for an H.B.C.U., noting that there may have been more: Not all students share their plans when they decline an offer.

Jonathan Holloway, the president of Rutgers and a historian, said the Missouri effect — which he experienced as the first Black dean at Yale College — coupled with what he called the “socially permeated pain” of police killings and racial hostility, forced majority-white schools to realize that mere diversity through admissions was not enough.

College leaders were falling short in supporting Black students, he said. “That allowed H.B.C.U.s to revolutionize the way they could tell their story.”

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Credit...Adraint Bereal for The New York Times

Dr. Kimbrough said the schools reasserted themselves as the “original safe spaces” for Black students, cultivating both their intellects and their spirits. In 2016, the year after the Missouri protests, and with Donald J. Trump campaigning for the White House, some schools saw record increases in freshman enrollment, from 22 percent at Dillard to 49 percent at Shaw University in North Carolina.

“In the Black community, we’re really seeing a change in addressing mental health. I think parents are more sensitive now to what it means for their kids to traverse these worlds, of what it means to be Black in all these different spaces,” said Michelle A. Purdy, an associate professor of education at Washington University in St. Louis and author of “Transforming the Elite: Black Students and the Desegregation of Private School.”

Spencer Jones, 21, a rising Dillard senior with his sights set on law school, recalled the support he had received. During the protests after George Floyd’s murder in 2020, he said, a professor emailed students over the summer to check on their well-being, and last year class discussions centered on the pandemic’s disproportionate toll on African Americans. “It gave us a deeper sense of what it means to be Black, going to an H.B.C.U. at this time, that we really couldn’t have gotten anywhere else,” he said.

Mr. Mbacke, the Morehouse student, often passes two campus landmarks: a statue of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the tomb of that civil rights leader’s mentor, Dr. Benjamin Mays, Morehouse’s sixth president.

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Credit...Adraint Bereal for The New York Times

“Every day we actually walk the same steps as them,” said Mr. Mbacke, a physics major who just finished his third year at the school, which had record enrollment last year and like its neighbor, Spelman, is a top-ranked H.B.C.U. “You’re directly investing in a Black-centric atmosphere. You’re doing your part, no matter how small it may seem. You’re changing the world, no matter whether you can see it or not.”

The renewed appeal of H.B.C.U.s is particularly notable among middle- and upper-class Black parents who attended elite, predominantly white schools, said Sammy Redd, a college counselor and Yale graduate. He spent years steering students to those schools with the same message he heard growing up, he said: “The Ivies were the mountaintop.”

But then some Generation X parents, who had pushed through doors that were shut to their own parents, began redefining what “the best” meant — and reckoning with the implications of their past choices.

Referring to the historically Black colleges, Dr. Redd said, “There was this sense that these institutions who nurtured our people didn’t get anything back.” He added, “Those parents were asking themselves, ‘Do we have an obligation and responsibility to support them?’”

For Gabrielle Armstrong, a competitive student in Durham, N.C., the answer was yes. Ms. Armstrong, 18, whose grandparents were H.B.C.U. graduates and whose parents went to Yale, had long dreamed of attending Duke University in her hometown. But ultimately she opted not to apply, and decided on Elizabeth City State University, a small North Carolina H.B.C.U. She’ll start in the fall.

H.B.C.U. Students Show Us Their Campus Spirit

Eve Lyons Looking at Howard through student lenses

H.B.C.U. Students Show Us Their Campus Spirit

Eve Lyons Looking at Howard through student lenses

Kemi Karim for The New York Times

To capture the essence of life at one of the nation’s H.B.C.U.s, or historically Black colleges and universities, eight Howard University photography students documented a meaningful part of campus culture.

Here’s what they chose →

“A fear of mine was going to an H.B.C.U. and not having a lot of resources,” she said. “But I realized that if I want other Blacks to have a first-class education at an H.B.C.U., part of that is me going to one, graduating and giving back.”

“I figured I have the rest of my life to be treated like a minority, to fight to be seen as human,” she added. “I might as well spend four years being seen as family.”

$2 Billion vs. $200 Billion

Unlike their mostly white counterparts, H.B.C.U.s still carry the burdens of the country’s original sin. They overwhelmingly serve students from low-income households and those who have borne the brunt of an inequitable K-12 system. The schools have long been underfunded — and typically charge lower tuition — compared with predominantly white colleges, and most don’t have a pipeline of rich donors.

In fiscal year 2020, the 10 largest H.B.C.U. endowments totaled $2 billion, compared with $200 billion for the top 10 predominantly white institutions, as reported by the schools.

Many smaller H.B.C.U.s have struggled or buckled in recent years under financial strains, enrollment pressures or, in extreme cases, losing accreditation that ensured federal funding and credibility.

Even Howard, the prestigious Washington school long known as “the Black Harvard” — offering disciplines from literature to medicine, consistently ranking among the best H.B.C.U.s — has faced challenges. Last fall, Howard students held sit-ins and slept in tents to protest housing shortages and poor living conditions in the dorms, a concern shared at many H.B.C.U.s with aging buildings. After a standoff of over a month, students reached an agreement with the school and ended the protest.

At the same time, Howard has seen the renewed favor for H.B.C.U.s. Undergraduate enrollment climbed 26 percent between 2019 and 2021, students following in the path of alumni who include the Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, Vice President Harris and the award-winning actor Chadwick Boseman.

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Credit...Photographs by Adraint Bereal for The New York Times

Professors, alumni and admirers of the school call it “The Mecca,” harnessing the power of its history, its community and the talent within it.

The writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, an alumnus who extolled The Mecca in his book “Between the World and Me,” and Nikole Hannah-Jones, the Pulitzer-winning Times journalist who conceived of “The 1619 Project,” inspired pride on campus when they chose to join the faculty last year over other teaching opportunities: He left N.Y.U.; she turned down the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, where an internal battle broke out over a refusal to offer her tenure. “For too long, Black Americans have been taught that success is defined by gaining entry to and succeeding in historically white institutions,” she wrote in a statement. “I have done that, and now I am honored and grateful to join the long legacy of Black Americans who have defined success by working to build up their own.”

Their appointments also brought nearly $20 million from the Knight, MacArthur and Ford Foundations and an anonymous donor. It was one of several high-profile gifts to H.B.C.U.s in recent years from philanthropists and organizations seeking to remedy educational and racial inequities. The donations included more than $100 million from the Netflix founder Reed Hastings; more than $500 million from MacKenzie Scott, including $40 million to Howard; and $10 million from the Karsh Family Foundation to endow a Howard program in STEM — science, technology, engineering and math — fields where Black students have been historically underrepresented.

Five years ago, the school’s provost, Anthony Wutoh, invited 100 top-performing high school students to campus to pitch them the program. Like others, it offered full scholarships, a network and resources that could catapult them to the country’s top graduate and professional programs. (Over much of the past two decades, Howard has sent at least as many Black students to science and engineering Ph.D. programs as Stanford, M.I.T., Harvard and Yale combined, according to the National Science Foundation.)

But it offered something more: It was created specifically for bright Black students like them who had felt isolated in mostly white science settings.

“You could just see this sense of relief,” the provost recalled. “There was this sense of, ‘I could just be myself, and just focus on doing as well as I could academically,’ and not wonder, ‘Do I belong here?’ or not have to wonder, ‘Do people feel like I earned my way here?’”

Video

Dr. Charles Drew teaching Howard University medical students in 1943. Credit Credit...By Critical Past

The Karsh STEM Scholars program is adding new luster to Howard’s profile in the sciences; its faculty once included Charles Drew, a surgeon whose research laid the foundation for the first blood transfusions, and Ernest Just, a renowned cell biologist. And it is helping provide a competitive edge over schools including Cornell, Georgetown, Johns Hopkins, and U.N.C.-Chapel Hill, according to a Times survey and interviews.

Jazmine Grant, a Karsh scholar who graduated this spring, said choosing Howard came down to one distinguishing factor: “an environment that was targeted toward Black excellence.”

Now bound for an M.D.-Ph.D program at The University of Texas in Houston, she was president of Howard’s chapter of the National Council of Negro Women, started by Mary McLeod Bethune — a civil rights activist whose footsteps she hopes to follow.

Image

Credit...Adraint Bereal for The New York Times

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Credit...Adraint Bereal for The New York Times

“Howard developed my confidence,” Ms. Grant said. “I’m going to be prepared in academia, and in my Black womanhood — knowing any space that I enter into, I can make a change, I can bring forth new ideas, I can bring what I learned to where I’m about to go.”

‘A Challenge to the System’

The 911 call came in January, describing bombs placed in Spelman’s hallways — one of dozens of such threats against H.B.C.U.s over two months. “I had picked this school, this university because of this reason,” the caller said. “There are too many Black students in it.”

Ms. Parker was halfway through her freshman year when that threat was phoned in, captured in a recording later made public. “It was really hard to hear, but it’s the reality,” she said. It was also a jarring reminder of why H.B.C.U.s came to exist in the first place. “Here my everyday existence is a challenge to the system,” Ms. Parker added.

Image

Credit...Adraint Bereal for The New York Times

In the present-day movement toward the schools are echoes of the hardships Black people in America have faced going back centuries, said Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, an award-winning author and an alumna of Talladega College, a small H.B.C.U. in Alabama. Her novel, “The Love Songs of W.E.B. DuBois,” is a coming-of-age story that follows a young woman to a historically Black college and unearths generations of her family history.

Ms. Jeffers, whose mother and two sisters are Spelman graduates, and whose father taught at Howard and Morehouse, drew a connection to the forebears of today’s students: enslaved people brought to the country, clinging together in the bottom of ships. They managed to survive the unthinkable and stay connected to one another.

“The entire African American story is about seeking to maintain community,” Ms. Jeffers said. “So it should not come as a surprise that the descendants of these people from so many centuries ago are still seeking community.”

Ms. Parker, though she is still haunted by the bomb threat, sees reminders throughout campus that she belongs. In Fish Fry Fridays, where food that kids she grew up with would have scorned as “unhealthy and gross,” she said, here represents “fellowship among Black people.” In the wellness center pool, where the chemicals are adjusted to be gentle on Black hair. In classes led by Black male teachers, after not encountering a single one in all her schooling before. In the siblinghood of “Morehouse brothers” and “Spelman sisters.”

“Everything I thought I loved about loving Blackness has completely turned around,” she said. “Learning about my people, from my people, with my people, is such a powerful experience.”

Being at Spelman has been both empowering and humbling. The school, which last year received more applications than ever before, is a standout in the sciences. Ms. Parker, 19 and on the pre-med track, was accepted into a prestigious summer research program at the University of Pennsylvania. But she lost out on a coveted spot in a program at Vanderbilt to a classmate — a reminder that she’s no longer the only smart Black student in the room.

Image

Credit...Adraint Bereal for The New York Times

She recalled how her white high school classmates had reacted when she chose Spelman. Students had a “we don’t go there” attitude about H.B.C.U.s, she said. And they couldn’t fathom how she had gotten into Yale, let alone how she could turn it down.

But she could tell soon after arriving on campus that she had made the right decision. She and her new friends were driving and singing along to the R&B group Jodeci. Unlike that day back in the prep school auditorium, this time she knew every word.

Julie Tate contributed reporting.

Audio produced by Adrienne Hurst.

# data[].attributes.headline
A Civil War freed the slaves. The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution (1868) granted African Americans the rights of citizenship. However, this did not allow them to vote. African Americans would try to have says but people wouldn't listen. Then the black voting had registered and it jumped to 61%.

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A Civil War freed the slaves. The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution (1868) granted African Americans the rights of citizenship. However, this did not allow them to vote. African Americans would try to have says but people wouldn't listen. Then the black voting had registered and it jumped to 61%.

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Voting Rights for African Americans | The Right to Vote | Elections | Classroom Materials at the Library of Congress | Library of Congress

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A terrible and bloody Civil War freed enslaved Americans. The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution (1868) subsequently granted African Americans the rights of citizenship. Sadly, this did not always translate into the right to vote. Even after Congress passed the Fifteenth Amendment providing the right to vote, it would be many years before African Americans would be allowed to fully participate in the process.

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24% of people not colored have enrolled to hbcu's. Some blacks didnt want to go becasue they were hesistate they didnt have the tools they would need. They were able to give the students opprotunities to learn.

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Many in a generation that grew up with a Black president and Black Lives Matter are embracing Black colleges and universities.

Credit...Adraint Bereal for The New York Times

Published June 11, 2022 Updated June 17, 2022

Listen to This Article

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SeKai Parker looked on last spring as her prep school classmates tearfully embraced and belted out in unison every word of a Kelly Clarkson song.

It was the senior farewell at Holton-Arms in Bethesda, Md., and many of the teens were making college plans that would have them trading one elite, mostly white setting for another. Ms. Parker intended to accept an offer from Yale, which she had fallen in love with on a recent visit. But as she scanned her school auditorium, a familiar sinking feeling washed over her.

“I was sitting there by myself, I didn’t know a single word and I had no one to hold onto,” she recalled.

After school that day, she rushed out to meet her mother and made a life-changing declaration: I’m going to Spelman.

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Credit...Adraint Bereal for The New York Times

Choosing the historically Black women’s college in Atlanta was surprising for a student who had been determined to reach the Ivy League. Yale was one of 16 institutions, including three Ivies, competing for her to enroll.

But her decision reflects a renaissance in recent years among the nation’s historically Black colleges and universities, where their nurturing mission, increased funding and growing visibility have been drawing a new wave of students.

Once the primary means for Black Americans to get a college education, historically Black colleges and universities, or H.B.C.U.s, now account for just 9 percent of such students. But top-tier H.B.C.U.s — long bastions of Black excellence — as well as others are increasingly becoming the first choice for some of the nation’s most sought-after talent, according to interviews with dozens of students, guidance counselors, admissions advisers and college officials across the country.

They belong to a generation whose adolescence was shaped not only by the election of the first Black president but also by political and social strife that threatened the lives and liberties of Black Americans. For many families, the embrace of historically Black colleges has been influenced by concerns about racial hostility, students’ feelings of isolation in predominantly white schools and shifting views on what constitutes the pinnacle of higher education.

“College is the time when you’re trying to figure out who you are,” Ms. Parker said in an interview. “It’s impossible to figure that out in a space where you not only feel like you have to assimilate to fit into that space, when they didn’t invite you there or they tolerate you there, but you have to prove that your existence has value.”

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Credit...Photographs by Adraint Bereal for The New York Times

In the past few years, the nation’s H.B.C.U.s have experienced a boom. From 2018 to 2021, for example, applications for a cross section of Black schools increased nearly 30 percent, according to the Common App, a platform for students to submit one application to multiple colleges, outpacing the increases of many other schools. Submissions using the Common Black College Application, solely for H.B.C.U.s., are projected to reach 40,000 this year, quadruple the total in 2016. And enrollment has soared at some of the schools, even as it declined nationally.

There is also a growing recognition among policymakers and predominantly white schools of the value of H.B.C.U.s, and the fact that they have long operated at a disadvantage. Federal lawmakers have increased funding for the 101 schools, providing nearly $2 billion since 2017, as well as $2.7 billion this year in pandemic emergency relief. Alumni and philanthropists have donated over a billion dollars in recent years, funding scholarships and programs in science, technology and other fields. In April, Harvard, acknowledging that it had directly benefited from slavery in its early years, announced a faculty and student exchange program with H.B.C.U.s; Princeton soon after unveiled plans for research partnerships with some of the schools.

The groundswell of support has been unparalleled, said Lodriguez Murray, a senior vice president for the United Negro College Fund, the largest private scholarship provider for minority students and the leading advocacy organization for H.B.C.U.s.

“We say this is a renaissance for H.B.C.U.s, but the level of clout and capital the institutions have now is unprecedented,” Mr. Murray said, adding, “Frankly, it is about time.”

Lisa Fuller, the owner of College Primed, a college advising firm, noticed the new surge of interest in the schools around 2015, as protests erupted in the streets and on college campuses, when many more parents requested that she add H.B.C.U.s to their children’s lists of college applications.

“Families started to look and be introspective about ‘Where are we sending our kids?’ and started to search for safe havens,” she said. “Students asked, ‘Do I go somewhere where it’s sink or swim, or do I go somewhere where everybody’s swimming with me?’”

When it came time for her son to apply to colleges, Dr. Makunda Abdul-Mbacke thought it was settled: She had gone to Yale as an undergraduate and medical student, and earned a master’s in public health from Harvard. Her son, Khadim Mbacke, was on the radar of Ivy League and other highly selective schools.

“When we talked about what schools we were interested in, he said he wanted to look at Morehouse and Howard, and I was like, ‘What?’” she recalled.

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Credit...Adraint Bereal for The New York Times

She had imagined him in New Haven, eating in the same dining halls and studying in the same classrooms she had. But she realized how different his experience as a Black male today would be from hers as a young woman in the 1970s, when hard-won gains of the Civil Rights movement were taking hold.

Mr. Mbacke was 16 when neo-Nazis rallied in Charlottesville in August 2017, marching with torches on the University of Virginia, a school he was considering. Violence broke out the next day, leaving one woman dead. At his rural Virginia high school, he noticed overwhelmingly white enrollment in advanced placement courses. “One of the main things was that to be Black and smart, for some reason they tried to make it like those two things couldn’t coexist,” he said.

Then in 2019, a tour guide at the University of Pittsburgh pointed out a blue light emergency alarm system for students to summon security. The beacon was supposed to symbolize safety. For Mr. Mbacke, though, it conjured thoughts of a different outcome should his towering presence on campus ever be seen as a threat. “He’s 6-foot-3,” his mother said. “That’s the description of every Black man they put on the news.”

But after seeing Morehouse College in Atlanta, he was beaming, she recalled.

“His coming-of-age has been Mike Brown and Trayvon Martin and all the litany of young Black men that looked like him that have been killed too soon and taken away from their mothers and their families,” Dr. Abdul-Mbacke said. “There’s no golden key, no golden ticket when you’re Black in America,” she added. “You’re going to have to work hard, and if you can have a fair chance then you go for it. And he found that space.”

The Missouri Effect

America’s first Black college, called the African Institute, was opened in Philadelphia in 1837 by a Quaker philanthropist. Later renamed Cheyney University, it had a mission to train teachers and prepare workers for trades. After the Civil War, dozens of such schools for the formerly enslaved and their children began to populate the southern states, sustained by federal land grants, freedmen’s societies, churches and benefactors.

Over their history, H.B.C.U.s have educated most of the nation’s Black judges, half of its Black doctors and 40 percent of the Black members of Congress, as well as the current vice president, Kamala Harris. Though the schools — from research institutions to two-year programs — make up only 3 percent of the country’s colleges and universities, they produce 13 percent of all African American graduates, according to the United Negro College Fund.

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Credit...Frances Benjamin Johnston photograph collection, via Library of Congress

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Credit...Associated Press

Still, over the past half-century many Black students were drawn to predominantly white colleges and universities, which heavily recruited as they integrated, offering financial incentives and better resources.

That led to eroding enrollment at H.B.C.U.s — 279,000 students as of 2020, the most recent data available — and a perception, even in the Black community, that they were a second-rate option. “We had to our great detriment, and perhaps even our peril, accepted the narrative, ‘white is right,’” said Roslyn Artis, president of Benedict College in Columbia, S.C.

But in recent years, she said, the schools have been widely recognized for what they have always done: “punch above their weight.”

That attitude shift began in part because of the “Missouri Effect,” a term coined in 2016 by Walter Kimbrough, president of Dillard University, a private liberal arts H.B.C.U. in Louisiana. In 2015, students at the University of Missouri led monthslong demonstrations over a series of racist incidents on campus, ultimately forcing the university system’s president and the chancellor of the Columbia campus to resign.

Across the country, Dr. Kimbrough said, Black students began demanding better conditions and treatment at predominantly white institutions, and others began to reject them altogether.

Data showing how many students are applying only to H.B.C.U.s or have turned down majority-white schools in favor of historically Black schools is not available. Just as the most selective H.B.C.U.s are drawing more applicants, so are some of the nation’s other schools. The dean of undergraduate admissions at Yale, for instance, said the school had a record level of Black freshman enrollment the year Ms. Parker declined. The dean, Jeremiah Quinlan, said he knew of one other Black student admitted last year who had opted for an H.B.C.U., noting that there may have been more: Not all students share their plans when they decline an offer.

Jonathan Holloway, the president of Rutgers and a historian, said the Missouri effect — which he experienced as the first Black dean at Yale College — coupled with what he called the “socially permeated pain” of police killings and racial hostility, forced majority-white schools to realize that mere diversity through admissions was not enough.

College leaders were falling short in supporting Black students, he said. “That allowed H.B.C.U.s to revolutionize the way they could tell their story.”

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Credit...Adraint Bereal for The New York Times

Dr. Kimbrough said the schools reasserted themselves as the “original safe spaces” for Black students, cultivating both their intellects and their spirits. In 2016, the year after the Missouri protests, and with Donald J. Trump campaigning for the White House, some schools saw record increases in freshman enrollment, from 22 percent at Dillard to 49 percent at Shaw University in North Carolina.

“In the Black community, we’re really seeing a change in addressing mental health. I think parents are more sensitive now to what it means for their kids to traverse these worlds, of what it means to be Black in all these different spaces,” said Michelle A. Purdy, an associate professor of education at Washington University in St. Louis and author of “Transforming the Elite: Black Students and the Desegregation of Private School.”

Spencer Jones, 21, a rising Dillard senior with his sights set on law school, recalled the support he had received. During the protests after George Floyd’s murder in 2020, he said, a professor emailed students over the summer to check on their well-being, and last year class discussions centered on the pandemic’s disproportionate toll on African Americans. “It gave us a deeper sense of what it means to be Black, going to an H.B.C.U. at this time, that we really couldn’t have gotten anywhere else,” he said.

Mr. Mbacke, the Morehouse student, often passes two campus landmarks: a statue of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the tomb of that civil rights leader’s mentor, Dr. Benjamin Mays, Morehouse’s sixth president.

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Credit...Adraint Bereal for The New York Times

“Every day we actually walk the same steps as them,” said Mr. Mbacke, a physics major who just finished his third year at the school, which had record enrollment last year and like its neighbor, Spelman, is a top-ranked H.B.C.U. “You’re directly investing in a Black-centric atmosphere. You’re doing your part, no matter how small it may seem. You’re changing the world, no matter whether you can see it or not.”

The renewed appeal of H.B.C.U.s is particularly notable among middle- and upper-class Black parents who attended elite, predominantly white schools, said Sammy Redd, a college counselor and Yale graduate. He spent years steering students to those schools with the same message he heard growing up, he said: “The Ivies were the mountaintop.”

But then some Generation X parents, who had pushed through doors that were shut to their own parents, began redefining what “the best” meant — and reckoning with the implications of their past choices.

Referring to the historically Black colleges, Dr. Redd said, “There was this sense that these institutions who nurtured our people didn’t get anything back.” He added, “Those parents were asking themselves, ‘Do we have an obligation and responsibility to support them?’”

For Gabrielle Armstrong, a competitive student in Durham, N.C., the answer was yes. Ms. Armstrong, 18, whose grandparents were H.B.C.U. graduates and whose parents went to Yale, had long dreamed of attending Duke University in her hometown. But ultimately she opted not to apply, and decided on Elizabeth City State University, a small North Carolina H.B.C.U. She’ll start in the fall.

H.B.C.U. Students Show Us Their Campus Spirit

Eve Lyons Looking at Howard through student lenses

H.B.C.U. Students Show Us Their Campus Spirit

Eve Lyons Looking at Howard through student lenses

Kemi Karim for The New York Times

To capture the essence of life at one of the nation’s H.B.C.U.s, or historically Black colleges and universities, eight Howard University photography students documented a meaningful part of campus culture.

Here’s what they chose →

“A fear of mine was going to an H.B.C.U. and not having a lot of resources,” she said. “But I realized that if I want other Blacks to have a first-class education at an H.B.C.U., part of that is me going to one, graduating and giving back.”

“I figured I have the rest of my life to be treated like a minority, to fight to be seen as human,” she added. “I might as well spend four years being seen as family.”

$2 Billion vs. $200 Billion

Unlike their mostly white counterparts, H.B.C.U.s still carry the burdens of the country’s original sin. They overwhelmingly serve students from low-income households and those who have borne the brunt of an inequitable K-12 system. The schools have long been underfunded — and typically charge lower tuition — compared with predominantly white colleges, and most don’t have a pipeline of rich donors.

In fiscal year 2020, the 10 largest H.B.C.U. endowments totaled $2 billion, compared with $200 billion for the top 10 predominantly white institutions, as reported by the schools.

Many smaller H.B.C.U.s have struggled or buckled in recent years under financial strains, enrollment pressures or, in extreme cases, losing accreditation that ensured federal funding and credibility.

Even Howard, the prestigious Washington school long known as “the Black Harvard” — offering disciplines from literature to medicine, consistently ranking among the best H.B.C.U.s — has faced challenges. Last fall, Howard students held sit-ins and slept in tents to protest housing shortages and poor living conditions in the dorms, a concern shared at many H.B.C.U.s with aging buildings. After a standoff of over a month, students reached an agreement with the school and ended the protest.

At the same time, Howard has seen the renewed favor for H.B.C.U.s. Undergraduate enrollment climbed 26 percent between 2019 and 2021, students following in the path of alumni who include the Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, Vice President Harris and the award-winning actor Chadwick Boseman.

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Credit...Photographs by Adraint Bereal for The New York Times

Professors, alumni and admirers of the school call it “The Mecca,” harnessing the power of its history, its community and the talent within it.

The writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, an alumnus who extolled The Mecca in his book “Between the World and Me,” and Nikole Hannah-Jones, the Pulitzer-winning Times journalist who conceived of “The 1619 Project,” inspired pride on campus when they chose to join the faculty last year over other teaching opportunities: He left N.Y.U.; she turned down the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, where an internal battle broke out over a refusal to offer her tenure. “For too long, Black Americans have been taught that success is defined by gaining entry to and succeeding in historically white institutions,” she wrote in a statement. “I have done that, and now I am honored and grateful to join the long legacy of Black Americans who have defined success by working to build up their own.”

Their appointments also brought nearly $20 million from the Knight, MacArthur and Ford Foundations and an anonymous donor. It was one of several high-profile gifts to H.B.C.U.s in recent years from philanthropists and organizations seeking to remedy educational and racial inequities. The donations included more than $100 million from the Netflix founder Reed Hastings; more than $500 million from MacKenzie Scott, including $40 million to Howard; and $10 million from the Karsh Family Foundation to endow a Howard program in STEM — science, technology, engineering and math — fields where Black students have been historically underrepresented.

Five years ago, the school’s provost, Anthony Wutoh, invited 100 top-performing high school students to campus to pitch them the program. Like others, it offered full scholarships, a network and resources that could catapult them to the country’s top graduate and professional programs. (Over much of the past two decades, Howard has sent at least as many Black students to science and engineering Ph.D. programs as Stanford, M.I.T., Harvard and Yale combined, according to the National Science Foundation.)

But it offered something more: It was created specifically for bright Black students like them who had felt isolated in mostly white science settings.

“You could just see this sense of relief,” the provost recalled. “There was this sense of, ‘I could just be myself, and just focus on doing as well as I could academically,’ and not wonder, ‘Do I belong here?’ or not have to wonder, ‘Do people feel like I earned my way here?’”

Video

Dr. Charles Drew teaching Howard University medical students in 1943. Credit Credit...By Critical Past

The Karsh STEM Scholars program is adding new luster to Howard’s profile in the sciences; its faculty once included Charles Drew, a surgeon whose research laid the foundation for the first blood transfusions, and Ernest Just, a renowned cell biologist. And it is helping provide a competitive edge over schools including Cornell, Georgetown, Johns Hopkins, and U.N.C.-Chapel Hill, according to a Times survey and interviews.

Jazmine Grant, a Karsh scholar who graduated this spring, said choosing Howard came down to one distinguishing factor: “an environment that was targeted toward Black excellence.”

Now bound for an M.D.-Ph.D program at The University of Texas in Houston, she was president of Howard’s chapter of the National Council of Negro Women, started by Mary McLeod Bethune — a civil rights activist whose footsteps she hopes to follow.

Image

Credit...Adraint Bereal for The New York Times

Image

Credit...Adraint Bereal for The New York Times

“Howard developed my confidence,” Ms. Grant said. “I’m going to be prepared in academia, and in my Black womanhood — knowing any space that I enter into, I can make a change, I can bring forth new ideas, I can bring what I learned to where I’m about to go.”

‘A Challenge to the System’

The 911 call came in January, describing bombs placed in Spelman’s hallways — one of dozens of such threats against H.B.C.U.s over two months. “I had picked this school, this university because of this reason,” the caller said. “There are too many Black students in it.”

Ms. Parker was halfway through her freshman year when that threat was phoned in, captured in a recording later made public. “It was really hard to hear, but it’s the reality,” she said. It was also a jarring reminder of why H.B.C.U.s came to exist in the first place. “Here my everyday existence is a challenge to the system,” Ms. Parker added.

Image

Credit...Adraint Bereal for The New York Times

In the present-day movement toward the schools are echoes of the hardships Black people in America have faced going back centuries, said Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, an award-winning author and an alumna of Talladega College, a small H.B.C.U. in Alabama. Her novel, “The Love Songs of W.E.B. DuBois,” is a coming-of-age story that follows a young woman to a historically Black college and unearths generations of her family history.

Ms. Jeffers, whose mother and two sisters are Spelman graduates, and whose father taught at Howard and Morehouse, drew a connection to the forebears of today’s students: enslaved people brought to the country, clinging together in the bottom of ships. They managed to survive the unthinkable and stay connected to one another.

“The entire African American story is about seeking to maintain community,” Ms. Jeffers said. “So it should not come as a surprise that the descendants of these people from so many centuries ago are still seeking community.”

Ms. Parker, though she is still haunted by the bomb threat, sees reminders throughout campus that she belongs. In Fish Fry Fridays, where food that kids she grew up with would have scorned as “unhealthy and gross,” she said, here represents “fellowship among Black people.” In the wellness center pool, where the chemicals are adjusted to be gentle on Black hair. In classes led by Black male teachers, after not encountering a single one in all her schooling before. In the siblinghood of “Morehouse brothers” and “Spelman sisters.”

“Everything I thought I loved about loving Blackness has completely turned around,” she said. “Learning about my people, from my people, with my people, is such a powerful experience.”

Being at Spelman has been both empowering and humbling. The school, which last year received more applications than ever before, is a standout in the sciences. Ms. Parker, 19 and on the pre-med track, was accepted into a prestigious summer research program at the University of Pennsylvania. But she lost out on a coveted spot in a program at Vanderbilt to a classmate — a reminder that she’s no longer the only smart Black student in the room.

Image

Credit...Adraint Bereal for The New York Times

She recalled how her white high school classmates had reacted when she chose Spelman. Students had a “we don’t go there” attitude about H.B.C.U.s, she said. And they couldn’t fathom how she had gotten into Yale, let alone how she could turn it down.

But she could tell soon after arriving on campus that she had made the right decision. She and her new friends were driving and singing along to the R&B group Jodeci. Unlike that day back in the prep school auditorium, this time she knew every word.

Julie Tate contributed reporting.

Audio produced by Adrienne Hurst.

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Strict voter ID laws not only impact voters of color, but also politics. Some POC lacked access to get to voting polls and have better things to do. Longer wait times cut into work and more important thing. It was shown that longer wait times were more in neighborhoods with more racial , and ethnic minorities. Over all their votes counts towards our political future, helping us shape.

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Over the past decade, scholars have studied myriad ways in which certain state voting rules make participation disproportionately difficult for Americans of color - including strict voter ID laws, lines faced on Election Day, and other facets of our election system. This analysis catalogs some of the most prominent research findings on the negative impact of voting restrictions on voters of color.
There is a large and growing pile of evidence that strict voter ID laws disproportionately impact voters of color.

Using county-level turnout data around the country, researchers demonstrated that the racial turnout gap grew when states enacted strict voter ID laws.

Researchers have also looked specifically at the turnout of individuals in North Carolina without proper identification, and they found that the enactment of the law reduced turnout. The turnout effects continued even after the strict voter ID law was repealed.

Another study shows that voters in Texas who would be barred from voting absent the state's "Reasonable Impediments Declaration" (a court-ordered remedy allowing voters without proper IDs to participate) are disproportionately Black and Latino. The study argues that its "findings indicate that strict identification laws will stop a disproportionately minority, otherwise willing set of registered voters from voting."

An article using a similar methodology and administrative records found that voters of color in Michigan were more likely to show up to the polls without proper identification.

Yet another study used survey data to demonstrate that voters of color in states across the country lacked access to the needed IDs to vote in their state.

While some studies have argued that voter IDs have little effect on overall turnout, it is clear that voters of color are less likely to have the IDs needed to participate.

Restrictions on Sunday voting - such as those proposed last year in Georgia and Texas - would fall disproportionately on voters of color.

Our research showed that voters of color were substantially more likely to vote on Sundays in Georgia than white voters.

Another study argues that these Sunday voters do not seamlessly transition to other days after cuts are made. For example, when Sunday voting was outlawed in Florida in 2012, Black voters who voted on Sunday in 2008 were especially likely to abstain from voting.

Voters of color consistently face longer wait times on Election Day - lines that would be exacerbated by cutting alternative options, such as vote-by-mail or expansive early voting hours.

Our report from 2020 indicates that voters of color around the country reported longer wait times in the 2018 midterms, using self-reported wait times from a national survey.

Other researchers have used cellphone data to demonstrate the same thing: waits are longer in neighborhoods with more racial and ethnic minorities.

Other research - including work from the Brennan Center - has also used administrative data to show that polling places with fewer white voters have more slowdowns.

Even vote-by-mail options, however, don't completely level the playing field. Voters of color face more difficulties voting by mail, too.

Our research shows that mail ballots were rejected at much higher rates than those of white voters in the Georgia primary in 2020.

Other studies have found that this was true in Georgia and Florida's 2018 general elections, too.

Polling place consolidation is also especially harmful for the turnout of racial and ethnic minorities.

The Brennan Center authored the first academic study documenting the turnout effects of the Covid-19 pandemic. We showed that polling place consolidation severely depressed turnout in Milwaukee's presidential primary - and that the effects were even larger for Black than white voters.

This joins other research showing that voters of color are disproportionately impacted by polling place closures. This may be due to worse transportation access.

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The Impact of Voter Suppression on Communities of Color

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Studies show that new laws will disproportionately harm voters of color. Federal legislation is necessary.

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Whenever slavery was abolished, the reparations were given to the white people who "lost their property" rather than the black people who didn't have anything, any family, or any job. Today the average white family has roughly 10 times the wealth than the average black one. There also hasn't even really been any reparations towards the black community since slavery, there's been attempts but they have been overwritten and failed, so the black community started at square -5 and deserves a kickstart.

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Why we need reparations for Black Americans | Brookings

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Rashawn Ray and Andre Perry outline the history of reparations in the United States, missed opportunities to redress the racial wealth gap, and specific details for a viable reparations package for Black Americans.

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Some defenders of Confederate statues argue that they represent Southern heritage and pride rather than racist ideologies. They view attempts to remove these statues as erasing an important part of Southern identity. On the other hand, critics argue that these statues serve as painful reminders of a history of slavery, segregation, and racial violence, and should not be celebrated or honored.

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what are some ongoing debates about confederate monuments - Google Search

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77% of Black American are pro reparation while only 18% of white Americans are. This is because many black American have reported still being affected by America scars. Black Americans are asking for reparations through putting financial assistance for education, businesses and homes.

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Discussions about atonement for the enslavement of Black Americans have a long history in the United States, and efforts toward reparations for slavery and racial discrimination have moved forward in some places in recent years. In 2021, Evanston, Illinois, became the first U.S. city to create a reparations plan for its Black residents, and California that year set up the nation's first state-level reparations task force. Earlier this year, Harvard University created a $100 million "Legacy of Slavery" fund to allow scholars and students to examine the university's connections to slavery.

Americans view the prospect of reparations mostly negatively, a 2021 Pew Research Center survey found. Three-in-ten U.S. adults say descendants of people enslaved in the U.S. should be repaid in some way, such as given land or money. About seven-in-ten (68%) say these descendants should not be repaid.

Views of reparations for slavery vary widely by race and ethnicity, especially between Black and White Americans. Around three-quarters of Black adults (77%) say the descendants of people enslaved in the U.S. should be repaid in some way, while 18% of White Americans say the same.

There are also notable differences by partisan affiliation. Among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents, views are split: 48% say descendants of enslaved people should be repaid in some way, while 49% say they shouldn't be repaid. By comparison, only 8% of Republicans and GOP leaners say these descendants should be repaid in some way, and 91% say they should not.

When it comes to age, younger adults are more likely than older ones to say the descendants of enslaved people should be repaid: 45% of adults under 30 take this view, compared with 18% of adults 65 and older.

When Americans are asked about the legacy of slavery's effect on Black people today, 58% of the overall public says this affects the position of Black people in American society at least a fair amount, with 28% saying it affects them a great deal. Four-in-ten U.S. adults say the legacy of slavery has not much or not at all affected the position of Black Americans in the country today.

As with views of reparations, racial and ethnic differences on this question are notable. Black Americans (85%) are more likely than Hispanic (64%) and White (50%) Americans to say the legacy of slavery affects the position of Black people in the U.S. a fair amount or a great deal.

The partisan gap on this question is also wide. More than eight-in-ten Democrats (82%) say the legacy of slavery affects Black people in the U.S. a fair amount or a great deal, more than 50 percentage points greater than the share of Republicans who say this (29%).

Black Americans are much more likely to identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party; only about one-in-ten Black voters identify with or lean toward the Republican Party. As of 2020, White voters are slightly more evenly split, but the GOP has an advantage (53% to 42%).

Some racial, ethnic and partisan differences over who bears responsibility for reparations, what form they should take

In the Center's 2021 survey, the 30% of Americans who favored reparations were also asked about the institutions and individuals who bear responsibility for repayment. They were presented with four options: the U.S. federal government, businesses and banks that profited from slavery, colleges and universities that benefited from slavery, and descendants of families who engaged in the slave trade.

Three-quarters of reparations supporters say the federal government has all or most of the responsibility to repay descendants of enslaved people. A smaller share, though still a majority, say businesses and banks that profited from slavery (65%) have all or most of the responsibility. Fewer say the same about colleges and universities that benefited from slavery (53%) and descendants of families who engaged in the slave trade (44%).

Reparations supporters were also asked how helpful the following forms of repayment would be: educational scholarships, financial assistance for starting or improving a business, financial assistance for buying or remodeling a home, and cash payments. These adults are most likely to say educational scholarships would be very or extremely helpful (82%), followed by financial assistance with businesses (75%), financial assistance with home buying or remodeling (73%) and cash payments (57%).

There are some racial, ethnic and partisan differences in Americans' views of both the institutions that would be responsible for reparations, as well as the specific forms that reparations might take.

For example, more than six-in-ten Black and Hispanic reparations supporters (63% and 69%, respectively) say colleges and universities that benefited from slavery bear all or most of the responsibility for repaying descendants of enslaved people. By comparison, White and Asian American supporters of reparations are notably less likely to hold this view (41% and 44%, respectively).

Among those who support reparations, Democrats are 20 points more likely than Republicans to say the federal government bears all or most of the responsibility for repayment (77% vs. 57%).

When it comes to various forms of repayment, majorities of Black American reparations supporters say all four forms of assistance would be extremely or very helpful, and those in other racial and ethnic groups largely agree. Americans in each racial and ethnic group are least likely to say cash payments would be helpful.

Low expectations for the likelihood of reparations

Those who support reparations to descendants of people enslaved in the U.S. were also asked whether repayment - of any type or from any source - would happen in their lifetime. Most supporters of the idea say this is not likely.

Overall, three-quarters of U.S. adults who support repayment to descendants of enslaved people say it is a little or not at all likely that this will happen in their lifetime. Only 10% say it is extremely or very likely.

There are a few demographic differences among respondents on this question, too. Hispanic (21%) and Asian American (13%) reparations supporters are more likely than their White (6%) or Black (7%) counterparts to say it's extremely or very likely that these descendants will be repaid in their lifetime. And supporters ages 18 to 49 (12%) are more likely than those 50 and older (5%) to say it's extremely or very likely that these descendants will be repaid in their lifetime.
Note: Here are the questions used for the survey, along with responses, and its methodology.

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Black and White Americans are far apart in their views of reparations for slavery

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Discussions about atonement for the enslavement of Black Americans have a long history in the United States, and efforts toward reparations for slavery and racial discrimination have moved forward in some places in recent years. In 2021, Evanston, Illinois, became the first U.S.

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"HBCUs are a source of accomplishment and great pride for the African American community as well as the entire nation. The Higher Education Act of 1965, as amended, defines an HBCU as: “…any historically black college or university that was established prior to 1964, whose principal mission was, and is, the education of black Americans, and that is accredited by a nationally recognized accrediting agency or association determined by the Secretary [of Education] to be a reliable authority as to the quality of training offered or is, according to such an agency or association, making reasonable progress toward accreditation.”

https://sites.ed.gov/whhbcu/one-hundred-and-five-historically-black-colleges-and-universities/

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HBCUs are a source of accomplishment and great pride for the African American community as well as the entire nation. The Higher Education Act of 1965, as amended, defines an HBCU as: "...any historically black college or university that was established prior to 1964, whose principal mission was, and is, the education of black Americans, and that is accredited by a nationally recognized accrediting agency or association determined by the Secretary [of Education] to be a reliable authority as to the quality of training offered or is, according to such an agency or association, making reasonable progress toward accreditation." HBCUs offer all students, regardless of race, an opportunity to develop their skills and talents. These institutions train young people who go on to serve domestically and internationally in the professions as entrepreneurs and in the public and private sectors.

Fast Facts (Source: National Center for Education Statistics)

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White House Initiative on Advancing Educational Equity, Excellence, and Economic Opportunity through Historically Black Colleges and Universities

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HBCUs are a source of accomplishment and great pride for the African American community as well as the entire nation.

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Some people see confederate monuments and symbols and see it as history and what good those people have done. Others see it as oppression to the people now and the people before us. Also a way to remind people who's in charge and what they have done. Some say that these statues and symbols are wrong but tearing them down isn't the right way to go about it. "And because statues are about power ... when someone in power fell, their statues were attacked ... a way of sort of humiliating someone whose actual body you can't touch,"- Erin Thompson.

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Statues have long been a way to honor leaders, benefactors, heroes and the war dead, giving them permanence and a three-dimensional presence.

Over the years, they have come to mean many things to different people, including a way to remember, a work of art or simply a place for pigeons to roost.

But increasingly some of those statues, particularly those honoring Confederate leaders or victories and those connected with slavery have become a flash point for many -- removed or destroyed because of the pain, suffering or oppression they represent.

This push, which has ebbed and flowed over the years, recently gained renewed momentum after the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police in May, with statues either removed by protesters, the government or private organizations.

Not all agree that these historical representations should be taken down. President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have denounced "rioters" for pulling down the statues.

Trump even signed an executive order to protect monuments, memorials and statues, and has tweeted about jailing protesters for up to 10 years.

"I have authorized the Federal Government to arrest anyone who vandalizes or destroys any monument, statue or other such Federal property in the U.S. with up to 10 years in prison," the president tweeted on June 23.

But as some fight to preserve the monuments, even a descendant of Lee, Rev. Robert Lee IV believes they should be taken down now.

"Why are we protecting statues that symbolize oppression instead of protecting the people that were oppressed?" Lee said to ABC News in a July 3 interview.

In some cases, looters and vandals used the guise of peaceful protests to destroy property including statues dedicated to slave owners, Confederate leaders or other white men with controversial reputations. Many of those historical figures were prominent slaveholders and slave traders who acquired their fortunes through unpaid labor.

But experts interviewed by ABC News say erasing the past isn't the answer to calls for justice, police reform and an end to structural racism. What to do with the statues, which are expensive to maintain, is a more complicated question, whether it be removal, which is also expensive, adding context, which may be insufficient, putting them in museums or destroying them altogether.
'Statues have always been about power'
Historians have debated the issue for decades, with some saying cities and other locales should keep the sculptures intact and accept the historical figures for who they were -- warts and all -- while others see them as symbols of racism, oppression and African American pain.

"These individuals who are being celebrated ... their sole purpose was to destroy the country. And the second thing is that they lost ... a war to dissolve the country, and they were traitors," Lionel Kimble, vice president for programs at the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, told ABC News. "And I don't know of any other society, globally, where we hold up traitors and people who wanted to destroy the very fabric of ... society."

Erin Thompson, an art crime professor at the City University of New York's John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said statues generally weren't created to foster goodwill, but as an intimidation tactic.

"Statutes have always been about power," said Thompson, who has a doctorate in art history and a law degree. "From the beginning of human art-making, we see statues of rulers of powerful people and they're meant to send messages ... to keep reminding people that they're in charge."

"And because statues are about power ... when someone in power fell, their statues were attacked ... a way of sort of humiliating someone whose actual body you can't touch," Thompson added.

Kimble agreed, explaining that many Confederate statues were meant to elicit fear in opponents, and said they were also used as tools to terrorize Black citizens, including those who fought on the side of the Confederacy in the South.

"I think there are really two conversations going on. On one hand you have the Confederate monuments, which have a very checkered history as many of them were created as instruments of racial terror, instruments to support Jim Crow to oppress Black people in the south," Kimble said. "And a lot of these statues came, not as a direct result of the Civil War, but really in response to Jim Crow and the civil rights movement. So a lot of these things were designed to terrorize black people."

Conversely, the statues of the country's founding fathers, who were also predominately slave holders with histories of racism, are generally regarded in a different light, despite their pasts.

"The argument around these individuals as slaveholders is really a historical fact. These guys were some of the original American capitalists ... they made their money through the buying and selling of human beings," Kimble said. "In the larger American imagination, the Confederate statues occupy a very different space than statues of the Founding Fathers, which were erected to commemorate their work," he added.

During the recent protest, statues of historic figures like Robert E. Lee, Christopher Columbus, Ulysses S. Grant, Edward Colston and Jefferson Davis were torn down in the United States and overseas.

But Kimble said this is the wrong direction to take.

"We essentially want to cancel these Civil War generals and monuments, which I think is a mistake. Tearing these things down should not be the goal in," he said. "But there is a place for these statues and the place is in some sort of museum and not in the public space, which is meant to be shared by all people."
Shifting opinion
A recent Quinnipiac University poll found that there are significantly more people who support removing Confederate statues from public spaces around the United States than from a couple years ago.

"Historic figures in granite and iron that seemed protected just a few years ago now face the wrecking ball of public opinion," said Quinnipiac University polling analyst Tim Malloy.

According to the poll, in August 2017, 39% supported the removal of Confederate statues compared to 52% who wanted to get rid of them in June. Of those who support the idea in the latest poll, 84% are Black, 58% are Hispanic and 44% are white. Those that opposed their removal are 52% from Southern states and 64% from rural areas.

In Bristol, England, where a statue of Colston, a 17th-century slave trader, was tossed into the river, the monument was unofficially replaced with a statue of Black Lives Matter activist Jen Reid.

Bristol Mayor Marvin Rees referred to the Colston statue as one of the city's "dirty" secrets, but did not condone the statue's unauthorized removal.

The statue of Reid is in honor of her "life's work," which is the ongoing movement against racism and police brutality there and abroad. Twenty-four hours after Reid's statue was erected, the city council ordered it taken down and placed into a museum along with Colston's statue.
What to do about controversial statues?
Thompson said there have been several ideas floated to avoid removing statues, which costs just as much in some cases as it does to take care of them.

She suggested re-contextualizing statues with plaques that give context. "But seeing somebody up on a pedestal is so powerful that it's hard to believe that putting up a little bit of additional text, or putting up another statue nearby is really going to overcome that effective," she added.

Friends of the Public Gardens, a Boston-based community restoration organization said that "the cost for cleaning a piece of sculpture is approximately $700, while the cost for full restoration can be $20,000-$25,000."

The Smithsonian Magazine found in 2018 that during a 10-year period, nearly $40 million of taxpayer funds were spent on cleaning and preserving Confederate monuments, including statues.

"I also think a lot about where we allocate our preservation dollars because there are incredibly important Native American and African American historical sites that are just crumbling away because it's really hard to get funding to preserve," said Thompson.

And relocating controversial statues to museums isn't a simple solution.

"Museums have all sorts of stuff that they don't have room to display or don't have staff to conserve. And so it's not just as easy as treating a museum like the nation's attic for embarrassing racist stuff," said Thompson.

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Historians debate America's history of racism and Confederate monuments

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On the heels of the death of George Floyd, protesters have dismounted several statues around the world after learning the history of the person the art depicts.

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On record there are 101 HBCU'S , to day they strive to advance educate, social and economic progress for Black students and their families. They have flourished by bringing people with similar backgrounds together to find common ground educationally and socially. Also connecting them with their own background

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"My participation in TMCF has allowed me to use my voice, skills, and abilities in spaces I previously believed I did not belong. I was fortunate enough to have been selected as one of the hosts of the 2021 Leadership Institute. By taking on this leadership role, I could step out of my comfort zone. Unequivocally,

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Historically Black Colleges & Universities (HBCUS) In Title III of the Higher Education Act of 1965, Congress officially defined an HBCU as a school

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There are multiple reasons why people are against it but the one that caught my eye was the one that said that “None of the black people in America today are under the slavery issue.......it's over with". I feel the real point of reparations is to give back to those went through anything of that nature

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DETROIT (AP) - Few Americans are in favor of giving reparations to descendants of enslaved black people in the United States, a poll shows, even as the idea has gained momentum among Democratic presidential contenders.

Only 29% of Americans say the government should pay cash reparations, according to the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll.

But the poll reveals a large divide between Americans of different racial and ethnic backgrounds.

Most black Americans, 74%, favor reparations, compared with 15% of white Americans. Among Hispanics, 44% favor reparations.

Lori Statzer, 79, of West Palm Beach, Florida, opposes cash reparations and an official government apology.

"None of the black people in America today are under the slavery issue," said Statzer, who is white. "It's over with."

Using taxpayers' money to pay reparations "would be unfair to me," she added. "My ancestors came to this country, worked hard to become Americans and never asked for anything."

Poll respondents also were sharply divided by race on whether the U.S. government should issue an apology for slavery: 64% of white Americans oppose a government apology, while 77% of black Americans and 64% of Hispanics believe an apology is due. Overall, 46% of Americans favor and 52% oppose a national apology.

Not everyone realizes how horrible slavery was to black Americans, said 63-year-old Nathan Jordan, adding that the federal government should apologize for slavery "because it was wrong."

While he supports reparations, Jordan, who is black and lives in Vienna, Georgia, can't put a dollar figure on what would be fair.

"I don't think the government could even afford that," he said. "I don't know what the value would be. There are still a lot of (black) people trying to catch up. I'm not sure if they'll ever catch up."

Alicia Cheek, 56, of Asheboro, North Carolina, who is black, opposes both reparations and a government apology, saying white people today "can't be liable for what their ancestors did." She also questions how a fair amount could be determined.

The nation is marking 400 years since the first slave ship sailed to what would become the United States, bringing about 20 slaves to the British colony at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619.

Over the next two centuries, more than 300,000 men, women and children were forcibly brought to what is now the U.S. from Africa, according to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database.

The debate on reparations has flared on and off since the moment slavery in the U.S. officially ended in 1865.

After the Civil War, Union Army Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman promised compensation to freed slaves in the form of land and mules to farm it - hence the phrase "40 acres and a mule." But President Andrew Johnson took away the offer.

More than 120 years later, then-Rep. John Conyers, a Detroit Democrat, introduced legislation to establish a commission to develop reparations proposals. He reintroduced it in every congressional session until he resigned in 2017, and it was reintroduced last year by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, a Texas Democrat. Presidential candidate and Democratic Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey filed a Senate companion bill this year.

Other Democratic candidates have come out in support of reparations or at least a commission to study it.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Republican, has publicly opposed the idea of a national reparations policy.

Anita Belle, founder of the Reparations Labor Union in Detroit, says "doing the right thing means making amends for what a nation did wrong."

Belle said she was encouraged to see even a low level of support for reparations among white Americans.

"That's still progress," she said.

An apology for slavery would help the country move on, said Reuben Miller, assistant professor in the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration.

"And by moving on, I don't mean moving on and forgetting," he said. "I mean moving on past the atrocity. It would teach a lesson about the relationship of black Americans with their government."

The new poll finds that about 3 in 10 Americans think the history of slavery still has a great deal of influence on black Americans. About another 3 in 10 think it has a fair amount of influence.

And many see enduring disadvantages for black Americans in public life. About two-thirds of Americans think white people are treated more fairly than black people by police, and about half see advantages for white people in applying for jobs or shopping in stores.

"We have to look at righting the wrong with cash to the people that were done wrong," Belle said. "To just say we aren't going to do anything is to just perpetuate the wrong."

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Associated Press video producer Noreen Nasir reported from Chicago.

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The AP-NORC poll of 1,286 adults was conducted Sept. 20-23 using a sample drawn from NORC's probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 3.8 percentage points.

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Online:

AP-NORC Center: http://www.apnorc.org/

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AP-NORC poll: Most Americans oppose reparations for slavery

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DETROIT (AP) - Few Americans are in favor of giving reparations to descendants of enslaved black people in the United States, a poll shows, even as the idea has gained momentum among Democratic presidential contenders.