from NPR (2013) / WHTEHBCU

10/21/13
The Whitest Historically Black College In America : Code Switch : NPR
The Whitest Historically Black College In
America
by SHEREEN MARISOL MERAJI and GENE DEMBY
October 18, 2013
3:08 AM
Listen to the Story
Morning Edition
6 min 12 sec
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Shereen Marisol Meraji/NPR
It opened in the late 19th century as the Bluefield Colored Institute,
created to educate the children of black coal miners in segregated
West Virginia. Although it still receives the federal funding that
comes with its designation as a historically black institution, today
Bluefield State College is 90 percent white. The road that separates
those realities is as rocky as any story of racial transition in postWorld War II America.
We went to the campus of Bluefield State to see what campus life
was like at this unusual college.
The very first student we met, Antonio Bolden, or Tony as he
introduced himself, looked like any other student you might see at a
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historically black college or university (HBCU). He's a laid-back 19year-old, stocky with shoulder-length dreadlocks and green eyes.
But at Bluefield State, Tony is an outlier for several reasons. He's a
teenager; the average age of his classmates is 27. He started
college right after high school; many of his classmates are working
full-time jobs, raising children, or both. And of course, he's black,
whereas the student body is only historically so.
Tony came to Bluefield State to play baseball,
hoping to win the starting spot on third base. But
he was surprised by what he found when he got
to campus. "My first thought was: There are a lot
of white people," he said.
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Shereen Marisol Meraji/NPR
"Where all the black people at?"
Where The Black People Went
The story of Bluefield State's racial transformation is wrapped up in
many of the big political and economic upheavals of the late 20th
century, although you might not guess it from the serene setting.
The college is tucked into the side of a hill, and folks at the school
joke about having to climb up and down the campus. A lot of the
folks we spoke to apologized for the campus's humble surroundings,
which seemed odd to us. It was gorgeous.
When we arrived, the trees in the mountains that ring the city were
just starting to change color. From the stairs of Conley Hall, the
building at the top of the hill, you can survey the entire campus, train
tracks cutting across the valley below.
This part of West Virginia was coal country and still is — trains still
haul coal along those tracks hugging the college's southern edge.
Many of the black folks who migrated to West Virginia to work that
coal sent their children to the Bluefield Colored Institute. By the
1920s, the school was a football power among black colleges and a
stepping stone for much of the region's black middle class.
In 1954, just a few years after Bluefield State earned full
accreditation, the Supreme Court declared segregation illegal in
Brown v. Board of Education, reshaping the landscape of America's
schooling. Suddenly black students had more educational options to
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choose from, in theory anyway. And black colleges and universities
like Bluefield State began having to compete with better-funded
predominantly white schools for top black students.
At the same time, new technology was making
mining jobs obsolete, and many black folks
started leaving the state, heading North to go
work in the factories. White veterans started
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Jon C. Hancock/AP
coming back to West Virginia after fighting in
Korea. And with the government footing their
tuition costs through the G.I. Bill, the state's
inexpensive black schools — the other was
West Virginia State University — started looking more and more
attractive to white students.
"We had an out-migration of students of color because of Brown v.
Board of Ed," said Jim Nelson, a spokesman for the school, "at
roughly the same time that we had an in-migration of largely
Caucasian students wanting to use their G.I. Bill benefits. So that's
what, as much as anything, that's what flipped the complexion of the
school."
By the mid-1960s, Bluefield State was only about half-black. But the
college, founded and run by black folks to serve black students, was
about to undertake a big, ugly fight over its future identity.
In 1966, the state picked Wendell G. Hardway to lead the college —
the school's first white president. Deirdre Guyton, who runs the
college's alumni affairs department, said that Hardway was the first
president to live off campus rather than at Hatter Hall, the house in
the center of campus named for the school's black founder. By 1968,
according to the book Bluefield State College Centennial History,
Hardway had hired 23 new faculty members — all of whom were
white. The book goes on to say that the college's dedicated faculty,
which had been all-black as recently as 1954, was only 30 percent
black by 1967. If there was a tug of war over what the college was
going to be, many of the black alumni and students felt they were
losing. Bluefield State was quickly becoming unrecognizable.
That tug of war looked a lot like battles being waged across the
country, like the growing divide between black folks who believed in
nonviolence as an avenue to black progress and those who felt that
method was taking too long and yielding too little. During halftime at
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homecoming in 1967, black students staged a demonstration on the
football field to protest what they saw as Hardway's discrimination
against black faculty and students. Things got rowdy. The police
were called. Students were suspended.
Things got rowdier. In 1968, the year that Martin Luther King and
Robert Kennedy were killed, tensions on the campus were boiling
over. Administrators started receiving death threats. Students met
with Hardway in a dorm, but that, too, went sour. Edgar James, a
black student and Army vet, tried to hand Hardway a list of 35
demands, one of which called for his resignation. That didn't go over
well.
A group of the more radical black students, including James, held a
meeting in November in the student union building. They wore
matchbooks with the letters "EOW" written on them. Hardway
translated the reference for an AP reporter: "The rumor on campus is
that it means they intend to burn down the campus by the 'end of the
week.' "
James, speaking to the same reporter on behalf of the radical
students, laid out what they saw as the stakes: "They are carrying
out mental genocide here, trying for the educational extermination of
the black student," he said. "There is a systematic weeding out of
the black student. This is an imperialistic and oppressive system at
Bluefield."
And then on Nov. 21, 1968, while most of the campus was away for
Thanksgiving, a bomb tore through the campus gym.
Although there were several campus employees nearby, no one
was injured. Newspaper accounts said that the explosion left a
gaping hole in the side of the building. Court papers said that lots of
people on campus knew of the plot to dynamite the gymnasium,
especially students living in the dorms, which those documents
describe as "virtually all black." ("You could forget about finding an
apartment if you were a black student at Bluefield State," according
to Tara Tuckwiller of the Charleston Gazette. "White landlords in the
area wouldn't exactly welcome you with open arms.")
In response to the bombing, Hardway shut down the dorms.
Hardway said the bombing was the work of Northern agitators who
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lived in those dorms. James was indicted for the bombing, but the
charges against him were eventually dropped. According to alumni
we spoke to, however, many black students felt that it was the
pretext Hardway needed to turn the school all white.
"The National Guard killed people at Kent State; they didn't close a
single dorm," said Lois Manns, an alumna from the Class of 1969.
"So why did you close dorms at Bluefield State for a bombing that
didn't injure anybody? And basically it was just a form of protest
when militancy and protest was the order of the times. It was the
'60s! So I think the reaction that the Legislature and other people
took shows their own racist agenda. Now that may not be a popular
thing, but if somebody thinks differently, then man up. Speak it to my
face."
The bombing and the closing of the dorms led
to a dramatic shift in Bluefield State's makeup.
The black students who'd come to the college
from far away suddenly had no place to live.
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Shereen Marisol Meraji/NPR
And with black folks migrating away from the
region, the Bluefield State campus began to
look increasingly like the rest of West Virginia,
one of the whitest states in the country. (West
Virginia State, the state's other black college
and the second-whitest HBCU in the country, underwent a similar
transformation.)
In the span of about two decades, Bluefield State had gone from an
all-black college to a mostly white commuter school. By 1987,
according to Bluefield State College Centennial History, the
dedicated faculty was 6 percent black. The school wouldn't have
another black president until 2002.
Bluefield State remains an HBCU because of a quirk of federal law:
To qualify as an HBCU and receive federal funding, an institution
must have served a predominantly black student population before
1964. There are several institutions today that serve a
predominantly black student body, but aren't designated or funded
as "HBCUs" because they didn't exist or weren't predominantly
black before 1964. But there's no mechanism in federal law for
removing that "historically black" designation. In other words, as
Shereen puts it: Once an HBCU, always an HBCU.
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But there is one group at Bluefield State College that to this day
remains resolutely black.
Bluefield's Past Meets Bluefield's Present
Back in the day, Bluefield State's alumni came from all over to
descend on campus for homecoming. They partied and rooted for
the football team as it squared off against West Virginia State, their
traditional rival.
"We had football, baseball, track, tennis, the whole thing," said
alumnus Russell Manns. "We had the whole deal. You couldn't
move on this campus from Wednesday through Saturday ... with
people coming back to be here for all the festivities. The fraternities
and sororities and things, they had things going on."
But Bluefield State scuttled its football program in the 1970s, which
meant homecoming without the big game. Nevertheless, members
of the shrinking Bluefield State Alumni Association still make the
sojourn back to southern West Virginia every year, football be
damned.
And every single member of that alumni association is black.
In fact, there's never been a white member, Guyton told us.
One of the few homecoming events every year is a luncheon to
honor the college's founders. This year's honored speaker was E.
Ray Williams, a black nonagenarian World War II vet who went to
Bluefield State on the G.I. Bill. He was speaking to an audience
made up mostly of fellow alumni.
There were about seven or so current students in attendance, mostly
from the homecoming court. They were hard to miss. It was the table
with the white kids.
It looked like the intervening decades since
their college days at Bluefield State had treated
the alumni well. Williams, the first of his family
to go to college, eventually had seven children,
all of whom went on to graduate college as well.
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Shereen Marisol Meraji/NPR
Even though he was in his 90s, Williams sat on
all sorts of community boards and was still
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active in his fraternity. And he credited Bluefield
State for the big life that he'd lived. People nodded in assent.
His fellow alumni in the audience were retired principals and social
workers and educators, with college-educated children and
grandchildren of their own. They were people like Gloria P. Brown,
whom everyone just called Go-Go.
If you've ever seen an Alpha Kappa Alpha sister, you'd know Go-Go
was a member from across the room: She was resplendent in a pink
skirt suit, heels and pearls. Her nickname isn't a coincidence: She
speaks like someone who's been talking at the top of her lungs for
most of her life, comfortably in control. She's in her 80s and her
current husband is in his 70s; Go-Go likes to joke that she's a
cougar.
Go-Go graduated from Bluefield State in 1951 and moved to
California to raise her family. Although she's missed a few
homecomings here and there, she makes it back almost every year.
She's a retired social worker, although she said that really just
means she works for free now. There's a brick on campus at the
University of Southern California with her name on it, a symbol of
her monetary contributions to the school where she received her
graduate degree. But she said she doesn't allocate the energy to the
deep-pocketed U.S.C. that she gives to Bluefield State.
The reverence that Go-Go and her fellow alumni expressed for the
Bluefield State of the past is matched only by their concern about
the college today. Many of the people at the Founder's Day
luncheon went to the school before the 1968 bombing, and they
were vocal about the ways they feel the school has changed for the
worse.
They had no delusions that Bluefield State was ever going to be a
majority-black college again, although they wanted the school to do
a better job recruiting black faculty members. Instead, they worried
that the school's history was going to fade away quietly, and that the
campus was no longer the kind of place that inspired much loyalty or
pride. No football team. No meal plan. No dorms. They reckoned
that it didn't look or feel much like a college at all, just a place where
people stopped to take classes on their way to other things.
Despite all the love that she feels for Bluefield State, Go-Go didn't
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send her own children there. Her daughter, a Ph.D., went to college
at Stanford on a full-ride. Go-Go asks, "Why would I send my
daughter all the way across the country to a place where she
wouldn't have anywhere to live?"
Even though the alumni saw themselves as protectors of the
college's legacy, one got the sense that they didn't think the school's
current student body cared too much about it. When it was time to
sing the alma mater at the end of the Founder's Day event, none of
the young people knew any of the words, a fact that did not escape
the notice of the alumni in attendance.
Most of the current students we spoke to knew about the school's
status as a historically black college, but treated it like a bit of trivia.
The players on the women's basketball team, who were planting
seeds for a homecoming event, joked casually about there not being
step shows or marching bands or black fraternities and sororities.
And that absence of a vibrant campus life was something that the
Bluefieldians, both young and old, seemed to agree on. All the stuff
that makes college so memorable — the late-night bull sessions and
parties and the big games and the deep friendships with people who
aren't like you — are all harder to come by when most of students'
lives take place off campus. Both the older alumni and the current
students, whether they were prompted or not, wondered why the
college couldn't bring back the dorms.
In the early aughts, the college announced that it was opening new
buildings. But nothing came of it. And Jim Nelson, Bluefield State's
spokesman, told us that in the state's current economic climate, an
investment in on-campus housing would be impossible.
If there was much anxiety about race and history among Bluefield
State's current students, though, it was pretty hard to tell. At the
homecoming dance the night before the Founder's Day luncheon,
black students and white students were all together doing the "Cha
Cha Slide" and the "Cupid Shuffle." The hundred or so folks getting
it in on the dance floor looked to be traditionally college-aged kids.
And these kids were, essentially, the student life of the campus. The
all-white homecoming court did the "Wobble" next to a clique of
black women's basketball players, who somehow managed to be
even taller in heels. Jerry Perdue, a gregarious white guy and the
college's student government president, gushed over last year's
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Miss Bluefield State, Danielle Haynes, a black science and
pharmaceutical major who had since graduated. Her mother had
been Miss Bluefield State back in the day, too.
"I get it, we love the history here and it's so amazing to hear about
it," Haynes told us later. "But my generation — we're not so much
hardened by the fact that we don't look like an HBCU. We just love
our school for what it is. [The alumni] said they found comfort here
and found family here, and I did too. And it doesn't look exactly the
same. But I did too."
What Does Bluefield Owe Its History?
Less than 60 years after the Supreme Court sent black students to
formerly all-white institutions and vice versa, it's still striking to find
these vestiges of that moment, like this mostly white, historically
black college with its all-black alumni association. For generations
of black students, institutions like Bluefield State were the only
option for a higher education.
Today, of course, black students have many
more choices. But HBCUs still play an outsized
role in black education — they make up only 3
percent of all the nation's colleges, but produce
half of all black teachers and they award a
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Shereen Marisol Meraji/NPR
disproportionate amount of bachelor's degrees
in fields like biology, math and computer
science, according to Marybeth Gasman, a
University of Pennsylvania education professor
who researches HBCUs.
This record is part of the reason HBCUs receive federal and state
funding to carry out their mission of educating underserved students.
And while the students might look different than they used to, said
Bluefield State president Marsha Krotseng, educating underserved
students is still the college's primary mission. Its HBCU designation
means that Bluefield State receives millions in federal dollars each
year, about a 10th of its total $20 million budget. It's money that the
school would be hard-pressed to replace.
It's easy to look at the parade of headlines about the challenges
HBCUs face as one, squirming mass of problems. Howard
University's president recently stepped down amid administrative
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rancor and serious fiscal troubles. Stricter lending rules for PLUS
loans have hampered students' abilities to pay for college, and has
led to lower enrollment at some black colleges. A recent study found
that several states were not matching federal funding for their
HBCUs at the same level as their traditionally white institutions, a
disparity amounting to tens of millions of dollars in under-funding.
But Bluefield State's history demonstrates just how unique so many
of these dilemmas are, given that these institutions have histories
inextricably wrapped up in the politics and demographics of their
cities and states. In fact, the situation facing some HBCUs in
Maryland is like a funhouse mirror of what's happened at Bluefield
State, according to the recent finding of a federal judge. The
institutions there are struggling, the judge ruled, because their
student bodies are too black. While they were diversely integrated in
the '70s, these institutions have re-segregated into predominantly
black places. Today, they're forced to compete with Maryland's
traditionally white institutions (that is, colleges and universities that
were white-only before Brown v. Board) that have deeper pockets
and can offer far more courses, advantages that stretch back to the
days of segregation.
As we thought about the Founder's Day luncheon, in which the
current students couldn't sing the alma mater, we wondered: what
do these students owe to their forebears? What does this institution,
whose funding stems in part from a historical detail, owe to that
history? And when the slowly shrinking Bluefield State alumni
association is no longer, who will be there to tell all the kids like
Tony Bolden where all the black people went?
If you've made it to the bottom of this story, you're clearly interested
in the story of Bluefield State. Listen to the story of Bluefield State as
it aired on Morning Edition, by clicking on the embedded player at
the top of the page.
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