It’s an understatement to say that American society, on the aggregate, has learned at a faster pace than usual in recent weeks about matters pertaining to our own country’s racial history. The Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 has been in the news. The origins of names like Aunt Jemima and of traditions like the University of Florida’s “Gator Bait” chant have escaped from the fringes of civil discourse, entering the mainstream. Juneteenth is being recognized by a growing number of organizations as an official holiday.
These pieces of history are, by definition, nothing new. But for many, myself included, it’s eye-opening to see so many hiding in plain sight, in many cases continuing to shape the country today.
One particularly notable, yet—by my decidedly non-expert estimation—under-cognized piece of America’s racial history, as well as America’s racial presence, is the ubiquity of Minority-Serving Institutions (MSI’s), most pertinently HBCU’s. I personally was unaware of the existence of HBCU’s until 2018, when the rise of this blog’s predecessor made me more keenly aware of low-major Division I men’s basketball, including Division I’s two HBCU conferences. So, as this and the disclaimer that follows may correctly lead you to believe, I’m learning a lot about this right now too.
A quick disclaimer: It’s difficult to find much primary source material on MSI’s right now. Much of what would be useful—information from various executive-branch-of-the-federal-government websites—is currently outdated (*eyebrow raise*). Because of this, more of the information below than I would like comes from Wikipedia. I don’t doubt the veracity of Wikipedia’s information on this, but I do think it’s possible that it too is somewhat out of date. Not as out of date as the executive branch’s websites, necessarily, but perhaps not currently 100% accurate. I wouldn’t share the information with you if I didn’t believe it to be completely true, but I didn’t want to give any illusions about this blog post and the fact-checking behind it.
It’s unclear, from some internet digging, whether MSI was initially the term used for MSI’s. What’s clear is that following the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Congress passed (and Lyndon B. Johnson signed) the Higher Education Act of 1965, which gave a concrete definition to HBCU’s—Historically Black Colleges and Universities. HBCU’s, per the Higher Education Act, were founded prior to the enactment of the 1964 Civil Rights Act for the express purpose of serving Black students. They remain thusly defined today.
Since 1965, six more categories of MSI’s have been created:
- Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSI’s; ex.: University of Texas at El Paso, which you might know as UTEP)
- Native American Non-Tribal Institutions (NANTI’s; ex.: Southeastern Oklahoma State University)
- Alaskan Native- or Native Hawaiian-Serving Institutions (ANNHI’s; ex. University of Alaska Fairbanks)
- Asian American- and Native American Pacific Islander-Serving Institutions (AANAPISI’s; ex.: California State University, Los Angeles)
- Predominantly Black Institutions (PBI’s; ex.: Chicago State University)
- Tribal Colleges or Universities (TCU’s; ex.: Dine College)
With the exception of TCU’s, for which the only requirement is that the institutions are controlled or operated by the governing body of a Native American tribe, these non-HBCU MSI’s are defined by the racial makeup of their student body and the portion that qualifies as “low income.” More specifically, it appears at least 50% must be receiving Title IV needs-based assistance, and somewhere between 10% (Hawaiian Native) and 40% (Black) of students must be of the designated racial minority.
In case you’re wondering why these seven categories of schools—HBCU’s and the rest—are federally defined, the Higher Education Act makes them eligible to receive specific types of funding, which appear to differ in nature between the seven categories.
As you might expect, HBCU’s and certain PBI’s were instrumental prior to 1964’s Civil Rights Act in securing any secondary education whatsoever for Black students. They were especially important in the South, where segregation forbid Black students from attending public universities. As you also might expect, they remain crucial today both as instruments of education and as cultural institutions. Again, they remain especially prominent in the South, because that’s where most of them are. Yes, the title of this post may have been misleading for many of our northern readers, many of whom do not, in fact, have a local HBCU. Apologies.
If you’re interested in supporting your local HBCU or HBCU’s, or at the very least learning about it or them, here’s the Department of Education’s list of the 101 currently accredited HBCU’s:
https://nces.ed.gov/COLLEGENAVIGATOR/?s=all&sp=4&pg=1
If you’re interested in supporting the mission of HBCU’s and PBI’s more generally, here’s the website of the Thurgood Marshall College Fund:
There are a lot of ways to address the problems at hand in America’s racial justice arena. Similarly, there are a lot of problems to address, and many are complexly intertwined. This is just one more action to consider. And at the very least, I shouldn’t have only learned about HBCU’s two years after graduating college. We should all know this history.
