Harris puts spotlight on HBCUs

Vice President Harris is the first presidential nominee from a major political party to also have graduated from one of the nation's historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), putting a bigger spotlight on those schools at a critical time.

Harris, an alumna of Howard University, accepted the Democratic nomination Thursday night at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

It served as a moment of great pride for many who went to HBCUs.

“She has shown the world that graduates of our esteemed HBCUs are leading the way to a more just and equitable society,” Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-Ohio), who attended Central State University in Ohio, told The Hill in a statement. “She is a vanguard for women and HBCU graduates everywhere.” 

HBCUs were created in the 19th century to offer higher education opportunities to Black Americans. Existing schools often did not welcome Black students. 

In 2024, 107 HBCUs around the nation serve more than 228,000 students, according to the Department of Labor, and produce nearly 20 percent of the country’s Black college graduates.

Some of the most prominent leaders from the civil rights era are HBCU graduates, including the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., a graduate of Georgia’s Morehouse College.  

“HBCUs have a long line of Black excellence and groundbreaking work, and so it really actually stands to reason that the first Black woman presidential nominee for a major party is a graduate of an HBCU,” said Adrienne Jones, a political science professor at Morehouse College. “The environments are very good for Black people, because they nurture folks in a country where that is not necessarily the norm.” 

Harris graduated from Howard with a degree in political science and economics in 1986. She then received her law degree from the University of California Hastings College of the Law. 

Elsie Scott, director of Howard’s Ronald W. Walters Leadership and Public Policy Center, said HBCUs beyond Howard are celebrating. 

“Everybody's claiming her. This is something for all of us,” Scott, the former president and CEO of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, told The Hill. “She has definitely made Howard University proud.” 

Scott said this moment is particularly inspiring for students, who are now able to see someone from an HBCU aspire all the way to the top position in the United States.  

“Students will say, if she can do it, I can do it,” Scott said.  

Scott said she also hopes that Harris’s HBCU history will lead to a better and more widespread understanding of why the schools are important, particularly amid a movement to limit how topics related to race and racism can be taught. Scott also noted that funding for HBCUs is dwindling in some states. 

“Some people, some congressional people, have said that it’s throwing away money and we ought to just close down all these HBCUs because now that segregation is gone, they can go to any school they want to,” Scott said. “But they don't understand the cultural aspect of going to an HBCU.” 

Though racial justice movements have led to a surge in donations and attendance at HBCUs, according to The Associated Press, there remains a disparity between funding for HBCUs and institutions that have predominantly white student populations. Last year, federal officials told 16 states that they had been underfunding their historically Black colleges and universities by $12 billion in total.

When it comes to donations, public schools that are predominantly white on average have endowments that are three times larger than public HBCUs while their endowments are seven times that of private HBCU endowments, according to a report by the Century Foundation. 

Scott attended historically Black universities for both her bachelor's and her doctorate degrees but graduated from University of Iowa, a predominantly white institution, for her master's. 

“When I was in Iowa, I spent a lot of time with Black undergraduate students, because I saw them struggling,” Scott said. “They didn't feel like they were wanted there. There was no culture for them there. So there's still a need for HBCUs because they provide that community, that call to a connection that a lot of the predominantly white schools do not offer.” 

A spokesperson for the university, in response to Scott’s remarks, said, “We believe strongly in the power of community at Iowa and are disappointed when we fall short of student’s expectations.”

Harris’s educational path stands out among presidential candidates and nominees, who typically have gone to Ivy Leagues for their undergraduate or law degrees. Barack Obama, the first Black president, attended Occidental College in Los Angeles before transferring to Columbia University. He also attended Harvard Law School.

Former President Trump, Harris’s fall opponent, enrolled in New York’s Fordham University before transferring to the University of Pennsylvania.

While Harris did not mention her time at a historically Black university in her acceptance speech at the convention, she did talk about her upbringing and reflected on how she decided on her educational path as a lawyer.  

“I wanted to be a lawyer and when it came time to choose the type of law I would pursue, I reflected on a pivotal moment in my life. When I was in high school, I started to notice something about my best friend Wanda. She was sad at school and there were times she didn't want to go home. So, one day I asked if everything was all right. And she confided in me that she was being sexually abused by her stepfather. And I immediately told her she had to come stay with us. And she did,” Harris said. 

“That is one of the reasons I became a prosecutor. To protect people like Wanda because I believe everyone has a right to safety, to dignity and to justice,” she added. 

Trump touted his work with HBCUs at his debate with President Biden in July, saying he “got [HBCUs] all funded.” While this claim was disputed, the former president did sign more funding into law for HBCUs. 

In the FUTURE Act, Trump gave $225 million in annual funding to minority-serving institutions, with $85 million allocated specifically to HBCUs. Since 2021, the Biden-Harris administration has given $16 billion to HBCUs.  

Biden also gave a a commencement speech at Morehouse College in May and at Harris’s alma mater last year.  

HBCUs hope Harris’s Bison history will inspire more students to consider attending one of the historied schools.  

“It's sort of revealing and exposing what HBCUs have already done in terms of producing people who are very productive members of our nation and of the world, but it's also showing what the possibilities are,” said Jarvis Hall, associate professor of political science at North Carolina Central University.  

“And again, that is good for the nation as a whole. That's good for the students who are at HBCUs and we'll send a message that HBCUs can produce people who can do anything, and not for just Black students, but all kinds of students, white students, other nationalities, other races. HBCUs are there for everybody. We are historically Black, but not all Black,” he added.