by Charlayne Hunter-GaultA distinguished Black journalist discusses the ironies of progress in the elimination of de jure segregation - weakening of the historically black colleges and universities which played an important role in the progress of Black Americans. - GWC
Hard Times at Howard U. - NYTimes.com:
Howard is not unique in the constellation of private and public H.B.C.U.’s, or even in the overall higher education community. Earlier this year, Moody’s put out a negative outlook on the entire higher education sector.
But as the saying goes, when white America catches a cold, black America catches pneumonia.
HOWARD, which sits on a sprawling 258-acre campus in Northwest Washington, has educated many of the civil rights leaders who fought to end segregation at white colleges and universities, among them Thurgood Marshall and Vernon Jordan Jr.
As a newly minted lawyer, Mr. Jordan worked on my successful case to desegregate the University of Georgia in 1961. (Now a Howard board member, he declined to be interviewed for this article.) In those days, the State of Georgia went so far as to pay black graduate students to study in other states if no black institution in Georgia offered the courses they wanted to take.
In my case, the University of Georgia had the only journalism school in the South — my dream was to be Brenda Starr, having read the exciting exploits of the comic strip character from an early age. Hamilton Holmes, who was also part of the lawsuit against the State of Georgia, had gone to Morehouse, the men’s H.B.C.U. in Atlanta, for almost two years before our victory. But the University of Georgia had more laboratory facilities than Morehouse, and Hamp, as he was known to his friends, wanted to be a doctor, so he chose Georgia.
The lawsuit made it possible for me and other students to pursue our dreams in places that had always been closed to African-Americans. Little did any of us realize the price many black colleges would pay for equal opportunity.
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