SeKai Parker, front left, who chose Spelman College from more than a dozen competitive schools vying for her, at the campus in Atlanta, April 1, 2022. — NEW YORK TIMES PHOTOS/ADRAINT BEREAL
Students at the library at Howard University in Washington. Many in a generation that grew up with a Black president and Black Lives Matter are embracing Black colleges and universities.
Students dancing at Market Fridays, known for shopping, music and other entertainment at Spelman College in Atlanta, April 1, 2022. —The New York Times Photo/Adraint Bereal
Delta Sigma Theta sisters at Howard University in Washington, April 8, 2022. —The New York Times Photo/Adraint Bereal
SeKai Parker looked on last spring as her prep school classmates tearfully embraced and belted out in unison every word of a Kelly Clarkson song.
It was the senior farewell at Holton-Arms in Bethesda, Maryland, and many of the teens were making college plans that would have them trading one elite, mostly white setting for another. Parker intended to accept an offer from Yale University. But as she scanned her school auditorium, a familiar sinking feeling washed over her.
“I was sitting there by myself, I didn’t know a single word, and I had no one to hold onto,” she recalled.
After school, she rushed out to meet her mother and made a life-changing declaration: I’m going to Spelman College.
Choosing the historically Black women’s college in Atlanta was surprising for a student who had been determined to reach the Ivy League. Yale was one of 16 institutions, including three Ivies, competing for her to enroll.
But her decision reflects a renaissance in recent years among the nation’s historically Black colleges and universities, where their nurturing mission, increased funding and growing visibility have been drawing a new wave of students.
Once the primary means for Black Americans to get a college education, the schools now account for 9% of such students. But HBCUs are increasingly becoming the first choice for some of the nation’s most sought-after talent, according to interviews with students, guidance counselors, admissions advisers and college officials across the country.
They belong to a generation whose adolescence was shaped not only by the election of the first Black president but also by political and social strife that threatened the lives and liberties of Black Americans. For many families, the embrace of historically Black colleges has been influenced by concerns about racial hostility, students’ feelings of isolation in predominantly white schools and shifting views on what constitutes the pinnacle of higher education.
In the past few years, the nation’s HBCUs have experienced a boom. From 2018 to 2021, for example, applications for a cross section of Black schools increased nearly 30%, according to the Common App, a platform for students to submit one application to multiple colleges, outpacing the increases of many other schools. Submissions using the Common Black College Application, solely for HBCUs, are projected to reach 40,000 this year, quadruple the total in 2016. And enrollment has soared at some of the schools, even as it declined nationally.
There is also a growing recognition among policymakers and predominantly white schools of the value of HBCUs and the fact that they have long operated at a disadvantage. Federal lawmakers have increased funding for the 101 schools, providing nearly $2 billion since 2017, as well as $2.7 billion this year in pandemic emergency relief. Alumni and philanthropists have donated more than $1 billion in recent years.
When it came time for her son to apply to colleges, Dr. Makunda Abdul-Mbacke thought it was settled: She had gone to Yale as an undergraduate and medical student and earned a master’s in public health from Harvard. Her son, Khadim Mbacke, was on the radar of Ivy League and other highly selective schools.
“When we talked about what schools we were interested in, he said he wanted to look at Morehouse College and Howard University, and I was like, ‘What?’” she recalled.
She had imagined him eating in the same dining halls and studying in the same classrooms she had. But she realized how different his experience as a Black male today would be from hers as a young woman in the 1970s.
Khadim Mbacke was 16 when neo-Nazis rallied in Charlottesville in August 2017, marching with torches on the University of Virginia, a school he was considering. Violence broke out the next day, leaving one woman dead.
Then in 2019, a tour guide at the University of Pittsburgh pointed out a blue light emergency alarm system for students to summon security. The beacon was supposed to symbolize safety. For Mbacke, though, it conjured thoughts of a different outcome should his towering presence on campus ever be seen as a threat. “He’s 6-foot-3,” his mother said. “That’s the description of every Black man they put on the news.”
But after seeing Morehouse in Atlanta, he was beaming, she recalled.
“His coming-of-age has been Mike Brown and Trayvon Martin and all the litany of young Black men that looked like him that have been killed too soon and taken away from their mothers and their families,” Makunda Abdul-Mbacke said. “There’s no golden key, no golden ticket when you’re Black in America,” she added. “You’re going to have to work hard, and if you can have a fair chance, then you go for it. And he found that space.”
The Missouri EffectAmerica’s first Black college, called the African Institute, was opened in Philadelphia in 1837 by a Quaker philanthropist. Later renamed Cheyney University, it had a mission to train teachers and prepare workers for trades.
Over their history, HBCUs have educated most of the nation’s Black judges, half of its Black doctors and 40% of the Black members of Congress, as well as the current vice president, Kamala Harris. Although the schools make up 3% of the country’s colleges and universities, they produce 13% of all African American graduates, according to the United Negro College Fund.
Still, over the past half-century, many Black students were drawn to predominantly white colleges and universities, which offered financial incentives and better resources.
That led to eroding enrollment at HBCUs — 279,000 students as of 2020, the most recent data available — and a perception, even in the Black community, that they were a second-rate option.
That attitude shift began in part because of the “Missouri Effect,” a term coined in 2016 by Walter Kimbrough, president of Dillard, a private, historically Black liberal arts university in Louisiana. In 2015, students at the University of Missouri led demonstrations over a series of racist incidents on campus, ultimately forcing the university system’s president and the chancellor of the Columbia campus to resign.
Kimbrough said HBCUs reasserted themselves as the “original safe spaces” for Black students, cultivating their intellects and their spirits. In 2016, the year after the Missouri protests and with Donald Trump campaigning for the White House, some schools saw record increases in freshman enrollment, from 22% at Dillard to 49% at Shaw University in North Carolina.
Spencer Jones, 21, a rising Dillard senior with his sights set on law school, recalled the support he had received. During the protests after George Floyd’s murder in 2020, he said, a professor emailed students over the summer to check on their well-being, and last year class discussions centered on the pandemic’s disproportionate toll on African Americans. “It gave us a deeper sense of what it means to be Black, going to an HBCU at this time, that we really couldn’t have gotten anywhere else,” he said.
The renewed appeal of HBCUs is particularly notable among middle- and upper-class Black parents who attended elite, predominantly white schools, said Sammy Redd, a college counselor and Yale graduate. He spent years steering students to those schools with the same message he heard growing up, he said: “The Ivies were the mountaintop.”
But then some Generation X parents began redefining what “the best” meant.
Gabrielle Armstrong, 18, a student in Durham, North Carolina, whose grandparents were HBCU graduates and whose parents went to Yale, had long dreamed of attending Duke University in her hometown. But ultimately, she decided on Elizabeth City State University, a small historically Black university in North Carolina.
“I figured I have the rest of my life to be treated like a minority, to fight to be seen as human,” she said. “I might as well spend four years being seen as family.”
$2 billion vs. $200 billionUnlike their mostly white counterparts, HBCUs still carry the burdens of the country’s original sin. They overwhelmingly serve students from low-income households and those who have borne the brunt of an inequitable K-12 system. The schools have long been underfunded compared with predominantly white colleges, and most do not have a pipeline of rich donors.
In fiscal year 2020, the 10 largest HBCU endowments totaled $2 billion, compared with $200 billion for the top 10 predominantly white institutions, as reported by the schools.
Many smaller HBCUs have struggled or buckled in recent years under financial strains, enrollment pressures or, in extreme cases, losing accreditation that ensured federal funding and credibility.
Even Howard, the prestigious Washington school long known as “the Black Harvard,” has faced challenges. Last fall, Howard students protested housing shortages and poor living conditions in the dorms. After a standoff of more than a month, students reached an agreement with the school and ended the protest.
At the same time, Howard has seen the renewed favor for HBCUs. Undergraduate enrollment climbed 26% between 2019 and 2021.
Professors, alumni and admirers of the school call it “The Mecca,” harnessing the power of its history, its community and the talent within it.
Writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, an alumnus who extolled The Mecca in his book “Between the World and Me,” and Nikole Hannah-Jones, the Pulitzer-winning New York Times journalist who conceived of “The 1619 Project,” inspired pride on campus when they chose to join the faculty last year over other teaching opportunities.
Their appointments also brought nearly $20 million from the Knight, MacArthur and Ford foundations and an anonymous donor. It was one of several high-profile gifts to HBCUs in recent years from philanthropists and organizations seeking to remedy educational and racial inequities. The donations included more than $100 million from Netflix founder Reed Hastings; more than $500 million from MacKenzie Scott; and $10 million from the Karsh Family Foundation to endow a Howard program in STEM — science, technology, engineering and math — fields where Black students have been historically underrepresented.
‘A challenge to the system’
The 911 call came in January, describing bombs placed in Spelman’s hallways — one of dozens of such threats against HBCUs over two months. “I had picked this school, this university, because of this reason,” the caller said. “There are too many Black students in it.”
Parker was halfway through her freshman year when that threat was phoned in, captured in a recording later made public. “It was really hard to hear, but it’s the reality,” she said. It was also a jarring reminder of why HBCUs came to exist in the first place. “Here, my everyday existence is a challenge to the system,” Parker added.
Parker, although she is still haunted by the bomb threat, sees reminders throughout campus that she belongs: in Fish Fry Fridays, where food that kids she grew up with would have scorned as “unhealthy and gross,” she said, here represents “fellowship among Black people”; in the wellness center pool, where the chemicals are adjusted to be gentle on Black hair; in classes led by Black male teachers, after not encountering a single one in all her schooling before.
“Everything I thought I loved about loving Blackness has completely turned around,” she said. “Learning about my people, from my people, with my people, is such a powerful experience.”
Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf
Shown is the Pennsylvania Capitol in Harrisburg. — AP Photo/Matt Rourke
HARRISBURG — Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf and state lawmakers are launching into their busiest stretch: the horse-trading and budget-making weeks of June that are vastly different this year than any other in memory, with billions of extra dollars to spread around.
It is a particularly unusual spot for a state that has been largely mired in deficits since the Great Recession and is struggling with a shrinking workforce and fast-growing elderly population.
There is, of course, no shortage of demands on the money.
“To me this should be easy, but it comes down to — and I’ll be honest — when everybody has money, they want to spend every last dollar,” said House Appropriations Committee Chair Stan Saylor, R-York.
Assembling a spending plan for the fiscal year starting July 1 will play out in the shadow of partisan fights over abortion rights, gun violence and proposed constitutional amendments that Republicans are wielding as a policy-making avenue around Wolf’s veto pen.
Wolf, a Democrat who is serving his last year in office, kicked off the budget season in February with a $43.7 billion proposal to the Republican-controlled Legislature. Its dominant feature is a request for about $1.8 billion, or about one-fifth, more for instruction, operations and special education in public schools. The aggressive request caps a hallmark of his tenure: a campaign to wipe out deep funding disparities between the poorest and wealthiest public school districts.
How much Republican lawmakers are willing to approve could determine how willing Wolf is to go along with GOP budget priorities.
Other major Wolf proposals include using federal coronavirus aid to send $2,000 checks to households earning under $80,000 a year — an idea that gained no traction with Republicans — and a $200 million scholarship program to bolster the state’s shrinking public university system.
Since he took office in 2015, Wolf has pushed to cut Pennsylvania’s corporate net income tax rate — one of the highest in the nation — but with structural changes to crack down on tax avoidance that were opposed by the Pennsylvania Chamber of Business and Industry.
This year, the chamber and Wolf are optimistic about a compromise.
Wolf’s office says his plans comprise a “historic opportunity to make Pennsylvania a more desirable place to live and work.”
House and Senate Republican leaders were working toward a joint counterproposal over the weekend and are on board with sending more money to public schools. But not nearly at the level Wolf wants.
They preach restraint, worrying over projections that the economy is heading for a slowdown.
The state’s bank accounts are now flush with — by some estimates — $12 billion in reserves and surpluses, boosted by inflation and an economy juiced with federal pandemic subsidies.
That is a revenue “bubble,” said Rep. Jesse Topper, R-Bedford, vice chairman of the House Appropriations Committee.
“It’s unprecedented and it is not sustainable,” Topper said. “So how do we go about using this money in a way that really helps set a good course for the future when the inevitable rough seas approach?”
A couple billion in leftover federal coronavirus relief aid must be spent by the end of 2024 and lawmakers expect to commit all of it this month. Water and sewer projects, state lands and businesses hurt by the pandemic are likely to get some of it.
Meanwhile, several billion in state reserves will be necessary to prop up spending next year.
There are other big demands on the state.
Nursing homes are warning of further closures without an increase in the long-stagnant Medicaid reimbursement rate.
The No. 1 priority of counties is to win the restoration of decade-old cuts to state aid for mental health services — a growing need that has been spotlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic and mass shootings.
Meanwhile, difficulty in finding workers to care for children, the elderly and disabled has budget-makers eyeing more subsidies for those professions.
Saylor said his goal is to keep at least $5 billion in reserve, “or the next governor is going to have a very difficult time.”
In a lot of ways, the billions of dollars in extra cash is making lawmakers open to things they have rejected for years.
Wolf’s office and lawmakers are eyeing ways to tear off Band-Aids — such as borrowing and delayed payments — that they’ve applied to the state’s finances during lean times.
The National Federation of Independent Business, for years, has sought improvements in how their members remit sales tax receipts and relaxed limits on expensing purchases. This year, the organization’s state director in Pennsylvania, Greg Moreland, is more optimistic than ever.
“I’m going to be pretty disappointed to be quite honest if we don’t see something big in the budget this year for small business,” Moreland said. “The timing’s right. The revenues look good. They can’t use that as an excuse any longer.”
ENTERTAINMENT
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House select committee Chairman Bennie Thompson, joined by Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., speaks to reporters as they leave the hearing room on Capitol Hill in Washington on Monday. — AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta
Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., followed by Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., walks to the hearing room on Capitol Hill on Monday. — AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta
WASHINGTON — Donald Trump’s closest campaign advisers, top government officials and even his family were dismantling his false claims of 2020 election fraud ahead of Jan. 6, but the defeated president was becoming “detached from reality” and clinging to outlandish theories to stay in power, the committee investigating the Capitol attack was told Monday.
On election night itself, Trump was “growing increasingly unhappy” and refusing to accept the results as they came in, former campaign manager Bill Stepien said in testimony played before the House panel.
Son-in-law Jared Kushner tried to steer Trump away from attorney Rudy Giuliani and his far-flung theories of voter fraud that advisers believed were not true. Trump would have none of it.
The back-and-forth intensified in the run-up to Jan. 6. Former Justice Department official Richard Donoghue recalled breaking down one claim after another — from a truckload of ballots in Pennsylvania to a missing suitcase of ballots in Georgia —- and telling Trump “much of the info you’re getting is false.”
“He was becoming detached from reality,” said former Attorney General William Barr, who called the voting fraud claims “bull——,” “bogus” and “idiotic,” and resigned in the aftermath. “I didn’t want to be a part of it.”
The witness testimony was shown as the House committee focused on the “big lie,” Trump’s false claims of voter fraud that fueled the defeated Republican president’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election and provoked a mob of his supporters to lay siege to the U.S. Capitol.
The panel also provided new information about how Trump’s fundraising machine collected some $250 million in the aftermath of the November election to keep fighting, mostly from small-dollar donations from Americans. One plea for cash went out 30 minutes before the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.
“Not only was there the big lie, there was the big ripoff,” said Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif.
Chairman Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., opened Monday’s hearing saying Trump “betrayed the trust of the American people” and “tried to remain in office when people had voted him out.”
As the hearings play our for the public, they are also being watched by one of the most important viewers, Attorney General Merrick Garland, who must decide whether his department can and should prosecute Trump. No sitting or former president has ever faced such charges.
“I am watching, I will be watching all of the hearings,” Garland said Monday at a press briefing at the Justice Department. “I may not be able to watch all of it live, but I’m sure I will be watching all of it, and I can assure you the Jan. 6 prosecutors are watching all of the hearings as well.”
Biden was getting updates but not watching “blow by blow,” said White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre.
Stepien was to be a key in-person witness Monday but abruptly backed out of appearing live because his wife went into labor. Stepien, who is still close to Trump, had been subpoenaed to appear. He is now a top campaign adviser to the Trump-endorsed House candidate, Harriet Hageman, who is challenging committee vice chair Liz Cheney in the Wyoming Republican primary.
The panel marched ahead after a delayed morning scramble, showing previously recorded testimony from the Republican aides as Trump latched on to repeated false claims about the election although those closest told him the theories of stolen ballots or rigged voting machines were not true.
Stepien and senior adviser Jason Miller described how the festive mood at the White House on election night turned as Fox News announced Trump had lost the state of Arizona to Joe Biden, and aides worked to counsel Trump on what to do next.
But he ignored their advice, choosing to listen instead to Giuliani, who was described as inebriated by several witnesses. Giuliani issued a general denial on Monday, rejecting “all falsehoods” he said were being said about him.
Stepien said, “My belief, my recommendation was to say that votes were still being counted, it’s too early to tell, too early to call the race,.”
But Trump “thought I was wrong. He told me so.”
Barr, who had also testified in last week’s blockbuster hearing, said that Trump was “as mad as I’d ever seen him” when the attorney general later explained that the Justice Department would not take sides in the election.
Chairman Thompson and vice chair Cheney, led the hearing after last week’s prime-time session drew nearly 20 million Americans to see its findings.
For the past year, the committee has been investigating the most violent attack on the Capitol since the War of 1812 to ensure such an assault never happens again. Lawmakers hope to show that Trump’s effort to overturn Biden’s election victory posed a grave threat to democracy.
Monday’s hearing also featured live witnesses, including Chris Stirewalt, a former Fox News Channel political editor who declared on Election Night that Arizona was being won by Biden.
Also appearing was the former U.S. attorney in Atlanta, BJay Pak, who abruptly resigned after Trump pressured Georgia state officials to overturn his defeat. Trump wanted to fire Pak as disloyal, but Pak stepped down after Trump’s call became public in which he urged Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to overturn Biden’s win in the state.
The panel also heard from elections lawyer Benjamin Ginsberg who discussed the norms of election campaign challenges, and former Philadelphia City Commissioner Al Schmidt, the only Republican on the city’s election board, who told the panel that regardless of how “fantastical” some of the claims that Trump and his team were making, the city officials investigated. He discussed facing threats after Trump criticized him in a tweet.
As he mulls another White House run, Trump insists the committee’s investigation is a “witch hunt.” Last week he said Jan. 6 “represented the greatest movement in the history of our country.”
Nine people died in the riot and its aftermath, including a Trump supporter shot and killed by Capitol police. More than 800 people have been arrested in the siege, and members of two extremist groups have been indicted on rare sedition charges over their roles leading the charge into the Capitol.
Additional evidence is to be released in hearings this week focusing on Trump’s decision to ignore the outcome of the election and the court cases that ruled against him, and beckon supporters to Washington on Jan. 6 to overturn Biden’s victory as Congress was set to certify the Electoral College results..
Lawmakers left no doubt as to their own view whether the evidence is sufficient to proceed.
“Once the evidence is accumulated by the Justice Department, it needs to make a decision about whether it can prove to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt the president’s guilt or anyone else’s,” said Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif, a panel member. “But they need to be investigated if there’s credible evidence, which I think there is.”
“The crimes we allege against Joshua Macias were always extremely serious, and as prosecutors, we have an obligation to continuously review this case as new facts and information come to light,” said DA Larry Krasner.
— Tribune Photo/Abdul R. Sulayman
“This investigation, this motion that’s being made today, is very important,” State Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta said. — Tribune Photo/Abdul R. Sulayman
One of the Virginia men arrested for allegedly attempting to interfere with the election at the Pennsylvania Convention Center during vote-counting in 2020 now faces trouble for his connection to Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio on the eve of the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection, District Attorney Larry Krasner said Monday.
The DA’s office intends to file a motion charging Joshua Macias with being in contempt of court.
“The crimes we allege against Joshua Macias were always extremely serious, and as prosecutors, we have an obligation to continuously review this case as new facts and information come to light,” Krasner said at a news conference. “What we now allege is as follows: Macias, heavily armed, traveled from Virginia to Philadelphia on Nov. 5, 2020, to interfere with the counting of presidential votes, motivated by his anti-democratic wish to preserve the power of Donald Trump, who lost re-election decisively. One month after he was released on cash bail over the Commonwealth’s objection, Macias attended a small, secretive meeting that included two persons now federally indicted for seditious conspiracy in connection with the Capitol insurrection.”
Tarrio was one of the people in the meeting.
According to Krasner, Macias and Antonio Lamotta packed a vehicle with an AR-15 with 100 rounds of ammunition and a .45-caliber handgun with 44 rounds. They also had equipment to pick locks to ballots.
“When they arrived, the DA’s office tried to have them held without bail because we consider them potentially very serious dangers,” Krasner said. “They were not held without bail and were given a relatively high bail of $750,000, but it was not enough to keep them in jail. Because apparently, insurrectionists have rich friends. And they were able to make that bail in November. And then, they went to Washington, D.C.”
Krasner said that Macias was once thought to be a “medium-sized fish” but that his direct contact with insurrectionists before the attempted uprising at the Capitol proves otherwise.
State Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta, who attended the news conference, said that as the hearings for the Jan. 6 insurrection continue, he is reminded of how close Philadelphia came to losing the “experiment of democracy.”
“This investigation, this motion that’s being made today, is very important,” Kenyatta said. “And it’s not just important for our democracy, though. But you can always judge the health of democracy by how we treat people in the dawn of their life, in the dust of their life, and the shadows. And right now, so many people are on the margins of our community who are made less safe by a president and a Republican party, which is echoed and parroted by his comments. So it’s made our democracy less safe.”
Krasner maintained that Macias must be held accountable given all the information about him.
“It is logical to infer that Joshua Macias participated in what is likely the greatest crime ever perpetrated against American democracy,” Krasner said. “In my opinion, Macias’ disdain and contempt for American democracy and our institutions, including the courts, are clear. We respectfully request that the court find him in contempt and order him detained for the maximum penalty of five months and 29 days incarceration in Philadelphia County immediately. His trial on the underlying charges is listed for October 2022.”
The hearing on the Commonwealth’s motion to hold Macias in contempt is scheduled for Friday.
