Generations of Missourians who have benefited from an education at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) may be scratching their heads this week after hearing that Betsy DeVos, President Trump’s newly confirmed Secretary of Education, called HBCUs “real pioneers when it comes to school choice.”
That stunning statement ignores the true history of HBCUs – born in the segregated Jim Crow South to provide a college education to black students who were barred from attending most other schools.
HBCUs weren’t responding to a need for “school choice.” They were responding to racism, segregation, and exclusion in higher education in America.
So to equate the founding of HBCUs – created to provide higher education for students who were legally barred from most other choices because of the color of their skin – with her vision for a vouchered education system that guts public schools, only shows Secretary DeVos’s fundamental misunderstanding of the history of racial oppression in this country.
That ignorance is just one example in a long list of reasons why Secretary DeVos is completely unfit to lead Missouri’s schools, and why I voted against her.
It’s why during the debate on her nomination, my office received more than 50,000 calls, letters, and emails from Missourians expressing their concerns about the damage her policies would do from our largest cities to our smallest rural communities.
What Secretary DeVos may not know is that HBCUs have played and continue to play a key role in our country’s education system. There are more than 100 Historically Black Colleges & Universities, including two in Missouri – Harris-Stowe State University and Lincoln University.
In 1989, President George H.W. Bush said of HBCUs, “At a time when many schools barred their doors to black Americans, these colleges offered the best, and often the only, opportunity for a higher education.”
President Bush was right. These schools were the “real pioneers” in helping educate some of the best and the brightest in this country – giving black students the first true choice to get a college education.
I hope Secretary Devos will come to understand this. That in a country founded on the principles of equality and justice for all, education is the most fundamental of opportunities—and every single citizen must be afforded one.
