HBCU is an acronym used to describe Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Although this description was not formally adopted by the U.S. Department of Education until 1965, such institutions have been around the United States since the first third of the 19th century, to provide educational opportunities for freed slaves and their descendants in an environment where they were otherwise largely denied access to higher education.
The first such institution was the Institute for Colored Youth, established in Cheyney, PA in 1837. That institution is still in existence, now known as Cheyney University of Pennsylvania. This entity and similar early institutions such as Wilberforce University in Ohio (established in 1856), offered education at the elementary and secondary level as well as college courses, to young people of color who had no previous educational experience. The pre-Civil War HBCU’s were all in Northern states and were funded primarily through private philanthropy.
At the end of the Civil War, institutions to educate young people of color began to be established in the Southern states. The first one was Atlanta University, now Clark Atlanta University, founded on September 19, 1865, exactly three months after General Robert E. Lee surrendered his army at Appomattox, VA. Numerous other entities followed in the next few decades, but the most noteworthy from the agricultural viewpoint was Tuskegee Institute, founded by Booker T. Washington in July 1881. The importance of teaching agriculture to black farmers in the segregated South was President Washington’s emphasis from the very beginning, and his hiring of George Washington Carver, a renowned plant scientist with a master’s degree in botany from Iowa State College--who had been the first black student on that campus--in 1896, cemented Tuskegee’s place in history.
As I discussed in a blog in April 2017, he land grant university system was established under the Morrill Act of 1862, signed by President Abraham Lincoln. It wasn’t until nearly 40 years later, with the Morrill Act of 1890 (also known as the Second Morrill Act), that Congress recognized the need to provide publicly funded higher education to students of color as well. The law barred all states, including those of the former Confederacy, from receiving land grant funds if they discriminated against admitting students on the basis of race, but gave them the option of establishing second land grant institutions in their states for African Americans, allowing them to keep their primary land grant institutions segregated. In all, 19 states opted to set up separate 1890 land grant institutions, including all 12 states that had made up the Confederate States of America and seven others from primarily border states. The majority of these states opted to give land grant status to HBCU’s already in operation, such as the Hampton Institute in Virginia, while seven of them set up new institutions.
While there are 101 HBCU institutions across the country, including such well-known universities as Howard (Washington DC), Morehouse College (Atlanta, GA), and Morgan State (Baltimore, MD), the rest of this blog will focus primarily on the land grant universities established under the Morrill Act of 1890, plus Tuskegee University. Although Alabama A&M University is formally the 1890 land grant institution in the state of Alabama, Tuskegee has standing equivalent to land grant status under several relevant federal laws.
In addition to his well-known role in finding crops such as peanuts, sweet potatoes, and soybeans that could be grown in the South in soils exhausted by decades of cotton cultivation, and developing hundreds of food products from those crops, Professor Carver played a pivotal role in helping make available early extension services to black farmers in the region. In 1903, then-Secretary of Agriculture James Wilson reached out to his friend and former Iowa State colleague, Seaman Knapp, to help establish an effort to educate farmers in the South about how to combat the emergence of the boll weevil infestation in cotton. Knapp’s initial effort was only available for white farmers, but within a few years he had reached out in turn to his former Iowa State colleague, Professor Carver at Tuskegee, to initiate a similar effort to target black farmers. With financial help from a New York philanthropist, Carver launched the Tuskegee Institute Mobile School in 1906, with the mule-drawn Jesup Agricultural Wagon, carrying equipment and faculty members to visit demonstration sites in Alabama, reaching 2,000 black farmers in the first year. By the summer of 1914, there were more than 100 black agricultural agents helping farmers in 10 more cotton-producing states in the South.
According to the Digest of Education Statistics, as of 2018, there were 251,000 students enrolled in all HBCU’s, and in the 2017/18 academic year, those schools granted more than 48,000 degrees. The 1890 land grants accounted for 15,449 of those degrees, or nearly one-third. Recent studies indicate that while state governments always give sufficient funding to their 1862 land grants to fully qualify for available matching federal funding, that is not always the case for 1890 land grants. In 2016, only ten of the schools got sufficient funding from their states’ coffers to fully qualify, although the other schools still received lesser amounts due to the granting of waivers.
These figures and other evidence that HBCU’s, especially 1890 land grants, have been denied adequate funding has spurred both private and public efforts to bolster their resources in the last few years. In 2020, MacKenzie Scott, the former wife of Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, donated more than $800 million from her divorce settlement to HBCU’s, Hispanic-serving institutions, and tribal colleges and universities. The money was given without initial public fanfare and without any requirements or conditions. The list of colleges known to have received Scott’s donations included seven 1890 land grants.
In the 2018 farm bill, Congress provided $50 million to establish three centers of excellence at HBCU’s and $80 million to fund scholarships at the same institutions. In July 2021, USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) awarded $22 million to 58 research and education projects to be conducted by faculty at several of the 1890 land grants, such as Kentucky State and West Virginia State.
