An excerpt from Black Enterprise -
A NEW BOOK MAKES THE ARGUMENT THAT HBCUS ARE OWED REPARATIONS
by Derek Major
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| Adam Harris' book The state must provide. (Image: Goodreads) |
While a student at Alabama A&M University, Adam Harris took a short drive to the University of Alabama-Huntsville and was shocked by the difference in the school and HBCUs.
Harris saw nothing but smooth roads, tree-lined streets, and new buildings. It looked nothing like the campus he called home.
“They had new and newly renovated buildings,” Harris told NBC News. “The library had longer operating hours and a more extensive collection. Potholes had been filled — if they’d ever been there. And very few of the students I saw that day were Black, which was interesting for a regional school because Huntsville is roughly 30% Black. But just 10% of UAH’s campus was Black.”
The visit made Harris wonder why the facilities at a white school founded in 1950 were better than an HBCU founded 75 years earlier?
Harris spent the next decade figuring out the answer to that question in his book “The State Must Provide: Why America’s Colleges Have Always Been Unequal—and How to Set Them Right.”
Harris, a reporter for The Atlantic, examined the history of how racial discrimination against HBCUs led to decades of underfunding and undermining that supplemented many of their struggles. Due to decades of bias and neglect by the federal government, Harris concluded that HBCUs are owed reparations.
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