THE STATE MUST PROVIDE
Why America’s Colleges Have Always Been Unequal — and How to Set Them Right
By Adam Harris
“The Blacker the college, the sweeter the knowledge,” the old saying goes. And with the recent appointments of Nikole Hannah-Jones and Ta-Nehisi Coates at Howard University, one may hear it with renewed vigor. When looking at the history of Black colleges, however, one can extend the maxim to include “the harder fought the battle.” From their inception, colleges established to educate the descendants of enslaved people have been given less and expected to do more. Highlighting the lives of those whose names line pages of case law, “The State Must Provide,” by Adam Harris, shows how the legacy of racism and exclusion shapes higher education today.
Harris, a staff writer for The Atlantic, exposes the menace in the mundane. Through vivid storytelling, he documents how white presidents of all-white, state flagship universities worked tirelessly alongside state lawmakers throughout much of the 20th century to keep segregation alive to the detriment of Black colleges. Some presidents even lobbied to close Black colleges to absorb their funding. Instead of educating their own citizens, a few states paid to send Black students seeking graduate education to neighboring states; Missouri sent 32 across state lines in 1935. A year later, Kentucky robbed Peter to pay Paul: It appropriated $5,000 to send Black graduate students out of state — and cut funding to one of its own Black colleges to make up the difference.
The lengths that states and their flagships took to keep schools segregated went beyond sending people away when the practice was outlawed by the Supreme Court in a landmark 1938 case. When the University of Arkansas was ordered a decade later to admit Silas Herbert Hunt, a Black veteran of World War II, to its law school, it held his classes in the basement to keep the institution as “segregated as conditions allow,” which was local sentiment and law. Separating Hunt from white students meant paying for additional space and instructional time. Colleges and state legislatures put strict limits on how much they could spend to educate students. There were no such caps to keep them segregated.
The decision in the 1938 Supreme Court case, between the University of Missouri and a Black law school applicant named Lloyd Gaines, also left states a glaring loophole; the chief justice’s opinion, Harris writes, “did not take issue with the separate clause of separate, but equal.” Black students had to be allowed to attend graduate school at a state university if no equivalent options were available at a local Black college. As a result, Missouri had to integrate the law school at its flagship university or build a legal curriculum at Lincoln University, a Black college 31 miles away. The state jumped at this chance to keep alive the “traditional policy of separate education.” It had 90 days to set up what took the university 90 years to build. There are head starts. And then there are handicaps. Some distances are hard to make up, even if moving with all deliberate speed.
“The State Must Provide,” however, is about more than inequities in higher education. It is a meditation on racism and inequality in America. The unequal lives of Black people were and continue to be further damaged by the unequal treatment of Black students in higher education. To fully understand just how unequal, we must look beyond the classrooms and courtrooms. Counties and country roads were equally decisive locales. Ada Lois Sipuel Fisher, who in 1949 became the first Black student at the University of Oklahoma law school, knew this reality. During her yearslong legal fight to gain admission, she lived in Oklahoma City, 20 miles away. Even after she was admitted, it was impossible and desperately unsafe for her to live near campus. Norman, Okla., like a number of college communities, was a sundown town, where Black people faced legal action, physical abuse or both if discovered after dark. It was not until January 2020 that the city of Norman would condemn and apologize for its status as a sundown town, which lasted into the 1960s.
Harris’s writing is as refreshing as it is haunting. His sobering account of Gaines, a sharecroppers’ son who became the lead complainant in the 1938 Supreme Court case, conveys the toll of uplifting the race. His efforts set the nation one step forward toward equality, helping to strike down discriminatory policies in higher education. But it also set a family and community back. After struggling with unemployment, doubt and fear of harm, Gaines vanished in March 1939, just months after the court ruled in his favor. His disappearance remains unresolved. With great compassion, Harris reminds us that the N.A.A.C.P., whose lawyers represented Gaines, did not just lose a complainant. “I am just a man.” These were the last words Gaines’s mother read in her son’s hand. Calls to mothers when Black children are at their most vulnerable seem to reverberate through the generations. Gaines’s picture may now hang at the University of Missouri law school and a building may bear his name, but he never got his day on campus.
Harris shows how these past wrongs still linger over colleges today. Money matters. And it does so especially for the future of historically Black colleges and universities, known collectively as H.B.C.U.s. We have seen newsworthy giving in recent years. The philanthropist MacKenzie Scott donated $1.7 billion, with much of it going to H.B.C.U.s. Prairie View A&M University in Texas received $50 million. Delaware State University and Lincoln University in Pennsylvania both received $20 million. These gifts can be lifelines, as Bennett College in Greensboro, N.C., saw in its valiant, albeit unsuccessful, effort to save its original accreditation. We should applaud these donations, especially as so much of philanthropic giving goes to elite colleges.
But we should also question the efficacy of one-time gifts. After decades of exclusion and discrimination, H.B.C.U.s’ endowments, which affect everything from infrastructure to financial aid, rival not those of their higher education peers, but those of private high schools. Phillips Exeter Academy, a boarding school in New Hampshire that educates 1,100 students, has an endowment of $1.3 billion. That is equivalent to the endowments of Howard University, Spelman College and Hampton University — the H.B.C.U.s with the largest endowments — combined. The weight of history dwarfs present-day gifts.
Harris opens the door to questions about reparations, not just to Black people but also to the institutions that educated them. What do historically all-white colleges that benefited from and carried out discriminatory practices owe? Still, payments absent the structural changes that directly address past wrongs will not be enough. We can no longer rely on affirmative action to address entrenched inequalities; the policy has been reduced to providing educational benefit to present-day white students rather than accounting for historical injustices. We must investigate how supposedly objective practices exacerbate differences sowed by discrimination. For example, are current accreditation practices, which take “financial viability” into account, as with Bennett College, fair or just if they ignore the intentional, generations-long fleecing of Black colleges?
Harris evokes a sense of urgency by laying out the stakes of letting longstanding inequalities among our colleges and universities continue as they are. He joins a new wave of scholars like Eddie Cole, Cristina Groeger, Matthew Johnson and Crystal Sanders looking critically at how race, education and history intertwine to shape our present-day reality. Higher education is like a hub in a wheel, connecting different parts of society, from the economy to the legal system. What happens in higher education affects us all. And what affects us shapes higher education. “The State Must Provide” is a must-read, detailing the complex dynamics that both reflect our nation’s dark history and show us the way toward a more equitable future.
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