2/1/22

I wrote the following essay before deciding on “blogging” on the topic of “African-American” golf specifically. Like HBCUs, African-American golf clubs (I belong to one) were formed over the years as an outlet for black golfers not welcomed at private clubs or when public accommodations were inaccessible. I’ll write more on the “Black Golf Club” experience later, but this essay gives a more fundamental premise of how two cultures/institutions coexist, even in 2022, under what Lincoln referred to as a “House divided“:

https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/01/us/hbcu-bomb-threats-tuesday/index.html

Sadly, but not surprisingly, on the first day of Black History Month 2022, HBCUs were again under threat.  This is not new and gets more and more wearisome. We are in the 21st Century! Fascinatingly, these institutions exist because of the imposed racial animus brought on by the same philosophy that threatens them now.  HBCUs formed because black people were not permitted to attend colleges attended by white people. Simply put, white people did not want black people in the same school (nor society) with them. For the most part, white people were fine with black people forming their own schools (once the education of black people was no longer illegal).  The only caveat was that black people remain “in their place” and in their own communities. In fact, popular thinking after the Civil War was that if these schools could produce their own doctors, lawyers, teachers, preachers, business leaders, civic leaders etc., segregation and American society, under the premise of “separate but equal,” could continue and flourish. For the majority of American history, this was a desirable outcome.

For generations of African-Americans, HBCUs were academic, intellectual, and cultural hubs for the entire black community. From the late 1800s through the mid-1900s, these institutions were the pride and joy of Black America. As integration in American society and colleges started to expand in the mid-20th Century, HBCUs started to be challenged by the availability of colleges to black students that were previously unavailable. An intra-racial rift was created. Where were the best and brightest black students supposed to go for college? If they were multi-generational HBCU legacies, should they look to form new alliances with America’s “elite,” previously denied institutions? There are not right or wrong answers to these questions, but they did (and do) pose a dilemma that many black families have tackled since the 1950s and 1960s.

Ironically, the ultimate weapon and insidiousness of racism is self-hatred. If you are a Baby-Boomer who had parents, grandparents, or older ancestors who attended college in America, it is most likely that they went to an HBCU. As the African-American, Baby-Boomer generation faced its time to attend college, many families had new decisions to make. Access to America’s “elite” predominately white institutions (PWIs) was now available.  Parents had the opportunity to send their children to previously denied, “new and promising institutions.” Access to greater generational prosperity was now on the horizon. Given that choice, many parents chose the PWI route for their children because they felt that the family could now access “The American Dream” that heretofore had been out of reach.  In addition, the feeling was that this new access was beyond the reach of their beloved HBCUs. African-Americans of the early-mid 20th Century had had access to higher education within their own communities, but this new frontier was access to what was believed to be a better and brighter future in a bigger and broader financial and social context. Hence, there are a lot of black Baby-Boomers who attended predominantly white, “elite” colleges in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s because in some sense, their parents felt that those places were “better.” Upon reflection and in light of the current physical threat to HBCUs in 2022, could that thinking have created a generation of educated, black people questioning allegiances and identity? Might Langston Hughes’ “dream deferred,“ now allegedly realized, have had the unintentional consequence of weaker and more vulnerable HBCUs? Can the intra-racial dilemma of a half-century ago, and its long-term consequences, leave a community’s most venerable institutions alarmingly unsupported and vulnerable?  Considering leads to learning; there are always more ideas, decisions, and futures to consider!