Founded during a time when educating Black Americans was strictly prohibited in the south and highly discouraged in the north, HBCUs have since been the pinnacle for developing exceptional black leaders. Martin Luther King, Jr., Kamala Harris, W.E.B. DuBois, Thurgood Marshall, and Oprah Winfrey are just a handful of prominent leaders who graduated from an HBCU. With no exception, these institutions set the standard for STEM education and the production of black graduates that go on to achieve Juris Doctorate and Doctoral degrees.
Taking a walk along an HBCUs campus, you suddenly realize that you’re at more than just a college or university’s campus. The reason is because HBCUs were founded to meet educational, social, and economic needs of black communities. More than merely a university, HBCUs are exemplars of civic leadership, social justice, and economic development institutions. However, the same discriminatory practices that have plagued black and brown communities have spread like an infectious virus to HBCUs. Redlining, double-dealing by the government, lack of access to capital, and misguided urban renewal projects are just a few examples. 100% of HBCUs are located in low-income tracts.
In the communities they exist, HBCUs spur sustainable economic development on scales comparable to anchor tenants like Amazon, Google, and Facebook. These communities demand much of the same resources that these institutions promise in RFPs: workforce training, housing and infrastructure development, employment opportunities, and economic activation. HBCUs have provided these resources to low-income tracts for more than a century but without the adequate funding from the local, state, and federal governments. In fact, it’s common for universities and their associated medical institutions to be the city’s largest employers. With funding on par to what their counterpart predominantly white institutions (PWIs) receive, HBCUs’ economic impact would be exponentially greater than it already is and sustainable, city-like economies would begin to sprout in locals prime for development.
HBCUs have thrived in realizing their mission to empower their communities in spite of the cards being stacked against them. We find their example to be inspiring and worthy of modeling as an example for other universities and professional institutions. Our research goes into understanding HBCUs as economic catalysts in their communities. We review cases where HBCUs serve as economic drivers in low-income communities and note the complex strategies they incorporate to tackle the needs and desires of those communities. The goal of our research is to determine the efficiency and effectiveness of HBCUs as economic anchors and propose how investment into their capital infrastructure can help them reach their goals and become sustainable in the long term.
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