President Trump met with black college leaders yesterday. Today, he signed an executive order pledging support and moving the Initiative on Historically Black Colleges and Universities from the Department of Education into the executive office of the White House.
The order “directs the initiative to work with the private sector to strengthen the fiscal stability of HBCUS, make infrastructure improvements, provide job opportunities for students, work with secondary schools to create a college pipeline and increase access and opportunity for federal grants and contracts,” reports AP. It doesn’t promise federal money.
Once barred from most universities, “black Americans, and their white supporters, founded their own schools,” reports American RadioWorks in The Living Legacy. Graduates “helped launch the civil rights movement, built the black middle class, and staffed the pulpits of black churches and the halls of almost every black primary school before the 1960s.”
Desegregation has forced the HBCUs to reinvent themselves.