Upswell of interest in black universities
State community college system guarantees transfer of credits to 9 institutions
When African- American high school students in California hear about “black colleges,” many of them located in the Deep South, they’re often bewildered.
“I always heard, ‘ You don’t live in a black world, so why go to a black college?’ ” said West Oakland native Khalil Rasheed, 36. “So when I decided to go on the black college tour, I didn’t take it too seriously.”
Suddenly, however, historically black colleges and universities are being taken very seriously. Last week, Apple donated more than $ 40 million in scholarships to black colleges to help increase diversity in the computer science and engineering workforce. In February, the White House honored several faculty members of black colleges as “champions of change” for cultivating “rich learning environments.”
And this week, the California Community Colleges system announced an agreement guaranteeing that course credits will automatically transfer to nine black colleges. California officials hope to quickly expand the agreement to include most of the nation’s 105 black colleges, where data show that retention and graduation rates of California community college students are high.
At a time when racially charged events are making headlines from Ferguson, Missouri, to New York’s Staten Island to Norman, Oklahoma, fans of black colleges are increasingly touting the campuses’ virtues. For one, they say, they are safe havens from bigotry.
“I could see how being on a ( black) campus would give me a sense of belonging, around my culture and history, without fear of being automatically judged,” said Kojo Pierce, 25, a criminal justice major at San Jose City College who thinks the new transfer system is a great idea.
Historically black colleges and universities were originally established to educate freed slaves after the Civil War and to circumvent Jim Crow laws. While the student bodies and faculty are mostly black, the schools — located up and down the East Coast and throughout the Midwest and Deep South — have always been open to all races.
March is the month the schools kick off annual tours and fairs to trumpet the institutions, especially in California, where black colleges aren’t as well known as they are in the East.
One of the oldest tours, organized by the late Carl Ray, a San Jose community organizer, flies students to Atlanta to visit Morehouse, Clark and Spelman in Georgia, as well as Alabama State and Tuskegee University, also in Alabama.
For Oakland’s Rasheed, the trip was a revelation.
“For the first time in my life, I saw lots of black people my age who were intelligent, cool, chic and yet were striving to become educated,” said Rasheed, who also found the campuses bucolic and well- equipped. “All that hit me like a lightning bolt.”
When he got a chance to visit Howard University in Washington, D. C., Rasheed was smitten by the urban location, 2 miles from the White House. He was sold upon meeting a student just admitted to Harvard Law School.
After Howard, Rasheed went on to Georgetown Law, where he graduated in 2005. “Howard taught me that nothing could stop me,” said Rasheed, now an attorney in Los Angeles.
In recent years, as some educators have questioned whether black colleges are still relevant, supporters argue that 28 percent of all bachelor’s degrees earned by African- Americans are from black institutions. More important, they say the schools need to be preserved because they were painstakingly built over many decades into monumental storehouses of black history and culture.
“These schools remain absolutely necessary,” said David Cunningham, president of the Bay Area chapter of the Tuskegee Airmen — the famed black pilots from World War II, who included Cunningham’s dad.
“To see California kids go into the Deep South and discover beautiful places where people like them are growing into scholars and strong individuals makes those schools positively essential,” Cunningham said.
On Saturday that message will be delivered at Stanford University at the 25th Black College Awareness Fair. Representatives and financial officers from black colleges and universities will be on hand, as will reps from Bay Area colleges interested in diversifying their campuses.
In recent years, as many as 500 students and parents have shown up, said Charlotte A. Gullap-Moore, a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha — a 107- year- old black