A Critical History of Black Higher Education: Institutional Death and the Black College

• In Event: New Directions in Black Educational History

Abstract

Historically Black Colleges and Universities represent living artifacts of the race based, dual education system of Jim Crow America. Following the 20th century collapse of legal segregation, traditionally white institutions opened their doors for the matriculation of Black students, and the original function of what we now call HBCUs became largely obsolete. In the wake of these developments, emerged a historiographical canon of Black Higher Education as a body of work that aimed to cement the legacy of historically Black institutions and guard against the threat of their extinction in a post-Jim Crow world. This literature sought to highlight the outsized impacts of these institutions in an effort to advocate for the preservation of their continued purpose as educational spaces uniquely situated to support the education of Black people. As such, the historiography born of this moment, centers the endurance and triumphs of Historically Black Colleges and Universities both individually and as a collective. Nonetheless, this triumphant framing of the Historically Black College has obscured the diverse history of Black Higher Education, a history littered with closures, consolidations and institutional failures. As Michel Rolph-Trouillot reminds us, “At best, history is a story about power, a story about those who won.” Thus, historical narratives that center institutions of Black higher education that have survived into the present reproduce the same structures of power that insulated those institutions from the destruction that met the majority of Black Colleges before the fall of legal segregation. Rather than tracing the history of Black Higher Education backwards from the perspective of extant HBCUs, this paper critically examines the entangled histories of race and higher education through the lens of two now defunct Black Colleges. Like HBCUS, these Black Colleges materialized during the 19th century emergence of a vision, and practice of higher education specifically created for the benefit of African descendant peoples. However, unlike HBCUs, these Black Colleges did not weather the tenuous landscape of Black Higher Education in the early 20th century. To explore these various geographies of race and higher education before the desegregation efforts of the mid-20th century, this paper deploys historical case studies of Avery College (1849-1917) and Roger Williams University (1866-1929). The comparative history of these Black Colleges presents two divergent readings of Black Higher education, and yet, their histories ultimately converge in the shared fate of institutional death. Recent advancements in digital history facilitate the assemblage of disparate archives to archaeologically reconstruct the historical landscape of Black higher education in America. In the end, a historical excavation of the defunct Black College, offers a holistic approach to the critical historical analysis of Black Higher Education.

Author

• Cassondra Hanna, Harvard University