Closure, Crisis, Organizing, and Abolition at Black Colleges

• In Event: Mobilization, Organization, and Rebellion in Higher Education

Abstract

This paper considers the sustained attacks on public Black Colleges in the neoliberal conjuncture following the midcentury Black Freedom Struggle. It is grounded in the field of Black geography, particularly Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s work on forgotten places and organized abandonment and Clyde Woods’ writings on asset stripping and plantation power. This work considers the ways that closure, merger, takeover, and fiscal starvation constituted some of the means through which state governments attempted to diminish the power of institutions born out of reconstruction and foundational to the second reconstruction. Centering anti-austerity organizing and movements for the community control of Black colleges, this paper will argue for the importance of public HBCUs as life-affirming institutions constitutive of abolition democracy.

Author

• Lucien Baskin, Graduate Center - CUNY
  Presenting Author