San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
HBCU campus in S.F. not so far-fetched
San Francisco being an appealing destination for historically Black colleges and universities seems a far-fetched idea. The city has a minuscule Black population and no history of HBCU culture. The closest HBCU to California is St. Philips College in San Antonio.
Still, the city has quietly become a top candidate for HBCUs looking to grow, so the idea of one opening a satellite campus downtown isn’t as fantastical as it once seemed.
Few know of the city’s burgeoning reputation as an HBCU destination as well as Sheryl Davis, executive director of San Francisco’s Human Rights Commission and a leader of “Black 2 San Francisco.” That initiative, under Mayor London Breed, will have students from nearly two dozen HBCUs taking classes here this summer.
Years before “Black 2 San Francisco” had a title, Davis was working to bring an HBCU presence to the city. Her goal as recently as last year was modest: spark the interest of maybe three to five of the country’s 107 HBCUs.
This summer, San Francisco will host students from 21 HBCUs, nearly one-fifth of all HBCUs.
The list of participating schools includes wellknown institutions like Howard University in Washington, D.C., and
North Carolina A&T, as well as lesser known schools like Fort Valley State in Georgia and Miles College in Alabama.
Davis and a few other Black leaders from the Bay Area did outreach for the “Black 2 San Francisco” initiative last month in Atlanta, the home of six HBCUs. Davis said she was blown away by the response to the program, which was announced in February.
“I walked away just really inspired by the massive amount of interest. Word is spreading, and people are seeing that what we’re trying to do is good for San Francisco in the short and long term,” Davis said.
The “Black 2 San Francisco” initiative launched with 20 student slots but increased to 40 because so many applied. All of the slots have been filled.
The University of San Francisco will provide housing for the students, while San Francisco State University will provide classroom space. Internships, training, mental health mentoring and other services will be offered by UCSF, in collaboration with the participating HBCUs.
“Black 2 San Francisco” and its long-term vision of a downtown satellite HBCU campus isn’t a cheap dream. HBCUs are historically underfunded, making the cost of an expansion too rich for many of them. The city plans to offset the costs using funds from local programs, as well as financial contributions from local benefactors.
The city’s Dream Keeper Initiative, launched in 2021 to invest $60 million annually in San Francisco’s Black community, and Mayor Breed’s “Opportunities for All” program, which provides paid internships and work-based learning for youth, have funds to contribute to the city’s HBCU pursuit. The OFA program, which receives $4.8 million annually from the city, also received an $11.8 million state grant in 2022 that will extend through this year. Davis said the city is negotiating a downtown location for an HBCU satellite site, but it’s too early to reveal where or associated costs.
The Bay Area holds a special place in Black America’s heart because of the history of Black activism here, from Civil Rights protests in the 1960s to Black Lives Matter being co-founded by a graduate student at San Francisco State in 2013. The legacy of the Black Panther Party, which had headquarters in San Francisco, still shapes today’s activism.
There’s also something poetic about San Francisco having an HBCU presence, because in 1968 San Francisco State became the first four-year college in the U.S. to create a Black studies department, according to Xavier Buck, a Black history scholar and the deputy director of the Huey P. Newton Foundation.
Buck was one of the
local Black leaders to visit HBCUs in Atlanta and envisions students learning about the Black Panther Party’s work in San Francisco and visiting Oakland’s Dr. Huey P. Newton Center for Research and Action, which Buck oversees.
“Everybody wants to talk about cultural competence in the classroom, but getting these students into a satellite campus in San Francisco where they’re able to learn about Black studies, tech innovation, learn about Black activism — this would actually be doing it,” Buck said.
HBCUs produce 40% of all Black engineers, 50% of all Black lawyers, 70% of Black doctors and 80% of Black judges in the country, according to 2022 data from the White House.
Both Vice President Kamala Harris (Howard) and Michael Regan (N.C. A&T), administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, are HBCU graduates.
San Francisco’s Black community has shrunk from 13% of the population in 1970 to 5.7% today, as Black folks have systematically been priced out of housing and have struggled to experience the same economic mobility as their white and Asian counterparts. If there’s any city in California that could benefit from an influx of Black doctors, judges, lawyers and engineers, it’s San Francisco.
It helps that while most colleges and universities experienced declining enrollment in recent years largely as a result of the pandemic, HBCUs have seen increases, meaning more are open to expansion.
According to data from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, overall nationwide undergraduate student enrollment between 2019 and 2022 fell by about 1 million students, or about 6% of overall enrollment.
Meanwhile, Black enrollment at HBCUs totaled 219,000 in 2019 before the pandemic, and after a dip in 2020, was back at 219,000 in 2022, according to the National
Center for Education Statistics.
In recent years, schools like Howard, Morehouse College and Morgan State University have even seen year-to-year undergraduate applications increase by as much as 60%.
The increased enrollment also comes as the conservative U.S. Supreme Court has ruled against race-conscious admissions. But neither right-wing America’s attacks on race-based curriculum, nor increased bomb threats against HBCUs, have stopped students from seeking an HBCU experience.
Celeste White was looking for one in 1991. The San Francisco native had just graduated from S.F. State and wanted to pursue a masters degree in political science, but she wanted to do it at an HBCU.
For many Black college students in California in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the NBC TV show “A Different World” was the only window into life at an HBCU. The series followed the lives of Black students attending the fictional Hillman College in Virginia.
That mainstream exploration of HBCU culture is why White decided to attend Clark Atlanta University. Fast forward to the present, and White is a professor at Clark Atlanta, where she has thrived for the past 15 years teaching sociology and criminal justice.
White told me she “couldn’t sleep the first night” after she heard about the “Black 2 San Francisco” program earlier this year.
“I immediately went to our school’s decisionmakers and told them about it, because I knew we had to be involved, and they said yes,” White said. She went on to say she plans to come to San Francisco in July to sit in on the first-ever summer session classes and hopes to teach at future summer sessions.
White borrowed a term from the Akan people of Ghana, sankofa, to explain an HBCU presence in San Francisco and the role of professors who left the city many years ago but are working to make this dream a reality.
“To Clark Atlanta and all HBCUs, it’s a sankofa experience,” White said. “It’s a return home in a sense and literally for me and others. I’m going to bring home every single nugget, resource and dream I was in pursuit of when I was in college and bring it to the fresh and shiny faces in the city who, like me, didn’t know about the HBCU experience.”