When my wife and I, both Howard University graduates, tried (unsuccessfully) to convince our three children to continue our college legacy, we repeated a line oft used by HBCU-grad parents: “You can be successful coming from any school, but the Black people who succeed from predominantly white institutions tend to say they achieved despite their Blackness. People from Howard say they achieved because of their Blackness.”
While that argument may have fallen on deaf ears (“too close to home” trumped other considerations), that essential difference is key to understanding the culture and community that bred a Kamala Harris during her years at Howard — the eye-opening, mind-expanding, perspective-shifting experience of having your being recognized, appreciated and affirmed as a superpower rather than a burden.
That, in many ways, is the promise of all historically Black institutions, then and now, and why — in a post-affirmative action/post George Floyd world — the number of applications to Howard and other HBCUs continue to exceed past records.
But I will admit my bias when I say that promise is especially fulfilled at Howard University, and that was especially true during the 1980s — the years that Harris and I spent there. A decade when Howard built the foundation for a dizzying array of high-achieving, groundbreaking graduates, from Pulitzer Prize winners to MacArthur Genius Grant recipients to Oscar nominees, network anchors, authors, entrepreneurs, renowned scholars and more who may not be household names but whose resumes are equally impressive. There is even a Facebook page, “I Went to Howard in the 80s,” dedicated to daily reminders of what those times meant. As one might expect, many of its recent posts — the faded Kodak camera disposal pictures of Yard and sorority life — have been focused on people’s memories of Kamala Harris.
We shared a couple of years on campus (I graduated earlier), but in the way that small schools work, our circle of Howard and Howard-adjacent associates blended socially and later politically as I went on to work with the Rev. Jesse Jackson on his presidential campaigns — just as she was building her own early career in politics.
The years we spent on campus were a perfect storm of change — politically, culturally, economically. We came in as the children of the civil rights movement, figuratively and literally. Many of the former leaders of SNCC, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, the SCLC, Operation PUSH and others who had marched to open doors for us just 20 years earlier sent their own children to Howard. Another civil rights veteran, Marion Barry, was running the city that had become our new home. All us were the embodiment and realization of their work, shielded and protected in many ways by our parents who were hellbent on us living differently. The memories of things that frightened and concerned us — wars, assassinations, protests, riots, scarred neighborhoods — were still fresh in our minds.
And though Black college enrollment overall doubled during the 80s, we still reflected a relatively small percentage of the population blessed enough to do so, with the vast majority of students attending only through some form of financial aid and more often than not, like myself, representing their family’s first generation of college entrants. Neither of my parents attended college. My father, who had children very late in life, was born in 1908. Eighth grade was as far as many went in his rural Virginia birthplace. My mother’s yearbook from Douglass High School in Baltimore said she wanted to attend the Cortez Peters Business College, a secretarial school founded by the world’s fastest typist. For reasons we never discussed, she never made it there. She, my stepfather, uncles, aunts, all small business people, also never attended college. They could provide lasting lessons in hustle and grit, but not clear advice on school choices or the university experience.
My choice to go to Howard was based on none of the kind of stats, anecdotes, comparisons and outcomes that I filled my children with during their decision-making process. It was all fairly superficial. Even though I attended Poly, Baltimore’s prestigious engineering and science magnet high school, and got mostly “A”s, an errant “C” in chemistry prompted my guidance counselor, a white man, to advise that I would never get into college and would be better off pursuing a job at the city’s Black & Decker or Bethlehem Steel plants — even though I had a stack of recruitment letters from major universities. Howard’s recruiter, a Black man, and the only Black recruiter I saw during that time, told me my ambitions had no limits and invited me to apply. Howard’s was the only application I completed.
I was accepted.
That was that.
Representation matters: Dozens of friends have some version of that same story.
In those pre-internet, pre-cellphone, pre-laptop, bootleg cable days, most students’ frame of reference for self-image was guided by the few images we saw on the television shows we grew up on. So few that the venerable JET Magazine still ran its “Who’s Black on TV This Week” page. In what could only be described as a combination of awe and humility, we stepped onto campus surrounded by a wealth of diasporic diversity — of regions, of nations, of faiths and ideologies, a cacophony of dialects, styles and skin tones. Preacher’s kids, Five Percenters, Hoteps, African royalty, fourth-generation legacies, b-boys, punks, models, surfers. It was a revelation. Particularly revealing was that many of us who were tagged as “exceptional” Black students in predominantly white spaces in our younger years found out rather abruptly that we were not only the norm — but that we would be faced with serious competition. It was at once empowering and intimidating.
But if the student body was impressive, we were also embraced and inspired by the generations that came before us — world-class faculty, parents, elders who routinely used the campus as recruiting ground, training ground and research facility. Heroes that we only knew from the iconic Budweiser Black History Month posters on our high school classroom walls were there and accessible: Shirley Chisholm, Harlem Renaissance photographer James Van der Zee, poets John Oliver Killens and Sterling Brown, surgeon Dr. LaSalle Leffall, film legend Haile Gerima, political strategist Ronald Walters and pioneering TIME war correspondent Wallace Terry, among many others.
Two days into my own early 80s Howard experience I met Kwame Ture, the former Stokely Carmichael, a Howard alum. Not on stage or a master class but randomly in a TV room at my dormitory, where the man who coined the phrase “Black Power” lingered for two hours while waiting for a shuttle bus and gave an impromptu lecture to a handful of freshmen imploring us to bring our newly learned skills to Africa.
I would be dishonest if I said we were all completely aware of who he was beyond the familiar face. It took me years of study and political awakening to grasp the weight of that moment. Yet it was the kind of casual brush with history and wisdom that happened frequently.
The Howard Inn, once the city’s only Black-owned luxury hotel (and now the school’s bookstore) was the Friday happy hour hangout for members of the Congressional Black Caucus, back when Capitol Hill stayed in Washington on weekends rather than retreating to their districts. Students seeking free chicken wings and cheap beers stood shoulder to shoulder with legends — Reps. John Lewis (D-Ga.), Mickey Leland (D-Texas), Ron Dellums (D-Calif.), Parren J. Mitchell (D-Md.) and William Clay (D-Mo.), among others — and got the side benefit of hearing war stories about the movement. They challenged us to find our own paths to activism and engagement.
For our part, on our mostly progressive campus, the Reagan-Bush era offered plenty of opportunities for dissent. Students joined the march to win the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, led battles to limit CIA and FBI recruitment on campus, launched protests pushing for divestment in Coca-Cola for its presence in apartheid South Africa and volunteered to be arrested in front of the South African embassy. At the latter part of the decade, the criticism from the student body that the school’s administration was too cozy with a White House perceived as openly hostile to the interests of the community sparked a legendary takeover of the administration building. That effort launched the aspirations and careers of two future big city Democratic mayors, Ras Baraka (Newark, New Jersey), son of famed poet and playwright Amiri Baraka, and Kasim Reed (Atlanta). In most cases, the school actively encouraged the spirit of protest, if not always the methods.
On a campus in the middle of the city, we lacked the luxury of being in a bubble, and students saw our neighbors in every direction impacted by the effects of federal policies, as well as the city’s own struggles. Something was trickling down from above but it wasn’t money or investment, and it was impossible to ignore. Fellow classmates disappeared or had their college careers lengthened well beyond four years as Pell Grants and other student aid benefits were reduced or cut outright. Drugs flowed suspiciously into the surrounding areas as the “War on Drugs” sent a record number of Black men to jail and, in turn, reduced the number of Black men entering college. AIDS, and the disinformation around it, alarmed and frightened.
These all became fodder for late night dorm conversations as we sharpened one another and committed ourselves to carrying on the legacy and using our talents to do something about them.
But it wasn’t all seriousness. If service and activism was an expectation, so was joy, fun and self-expression, which we were taught was necessary to steel yourself for other pursuits. Warm days on The Yard brought out West Coast roller skaters, Jamaican cricket teams, newly minted rappers, rockers, punks, fashionistas, nerds, sororities and fraternities. Culturally, the excitement of early hip hop, the evolution of disco to house, the ascendance of Prince, the percussive power of Go-Go, the romance of Quiet Storm (a radio format started at Howard’s commercial radio station), smooth jazz and new age converged, and it was all good. Moreover, the environment allowed one the freedom to embrace and abandon tastes and personas without judgment. But the most valuable lesson in that variety was that there was more than one way to be Black, more than one path to have a lasting impact on your people, on your culture.
There was also a unique bond built of struggle. Administrative problems like declining financial aid, subpar housing and other services made getting through four years an act of mutual survival. Decades later, that remains a part of the experience students would rather do without.
To some critics, white and Black, the HBCU experience has been called “unrealistic,” seen as a separatist dream world offering little preparation for “the real world” — coded language for the absence of whiteness. But the truth is the opposite. Similar to women’s colleges and religious colleges, HBCUs ground their students in a sense of their self-worth, the strength to overcome obstacles, the trust and belief in one’s own abilities.
The power to succeed because of, and not despite.
It’s the kind of grounding that allows one to believe they can be elected attorney general of the country’s largest state, senator, vice president — and president — amid a raft of barriers and nay-sayers. Anyone surprised by the confidence and command that Harris has shown in her first weeks of the campaign has not been paying enough attention.
It’s also not surprising that during her turn as vice president, Harris returned frequently to her college roots, visiting campus for a fireside chat on reproductive rights or giving the basketball team a pep talk after they lost a big game last year. In the past few weeks, she has used Howard as a home for her debate prep. In this time of scrutiny and pressure, she can absorb the restorative energy and sense of connection of the place that lifted her to this historic moment.
Earlier this month, she showed up on campus, armed with a megaphone, to cheer on incoming freshmen.
“You are receiving a superior education priming you to be leaders of our nation and in the world,” she told them. “Look what happened, you might be running for president of the United States.”
It’s what HBCU grads all do, center ourselves in a network of connections that continues to pay off, inspire and undergird in ways that are sometimes surprising.
Today’s generation of HBCU students, as well as other students across the spectrum of color and culture, have the tools and skills to connect, communicate and organize in ways that we could never have imagined. Moreover, they are acutely aware of the power they hold.
And for now at least, every indication shows that Kamala Harris is awakening and engaging Gen Z in the same way that she was energized by the elders who challenged us.
