THE STATE MUST PROVIDE

How the legacy of discrimination still affects opportunities for Black students in the realm of higher education.

Atlantic staff writer Harris, a former reporter at the Chronicle of Higher Education, makes his book debut with an illuminating examination of Black students’ access to college, arguing forcefully that integrated colleges have failed Blacks. Even though Black colleges “educate 80 percent of Black judges, 50 percent of Black lawyers and doctors, and 25 percent of Black science, technology, math, and engineering graduates,” they remain severely underfunded. The author traces the history of educational opportunities for Blacks beginning in the 19th century, when two noted institutions were established: Oberlin, in Ohio, and Berea, in Kentucky. Both were determined to offer interracial education, often flouting local laws—and, in Berea’s case, the wrath of slaveholders—to do so. Berea’s original structure was “burned to the ground by slaveholders and their supporters.” After the Civil War, 45 Black colleges opened, but Blacks were barred from attending even public, land-grant colleges. The Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896 upheld segregation, allowing states to pass laws making it illegal to educate Blacks and Whites together. Harris recounts lawsuits by students petitioning to attend all-White schools. In 1948, for example, when Ada Lois Sipuel sued to be admitted to the law school at the University of Oklahoma, the Supreme Court ruled that Oklahoma “was required to provide her a legal education.” In response, Oklahoma quickly established a law school at the all-Black Langston University. Later, when the University of Oklahoma grudgingly admitted Black students, it sat them at the back of the classroom or set up railings to separate them from Whites. Harris suggests ways that the government can offer reparations for its history of hampering Blacks’ education—perhaps as “targeted debt cancellation and tuition-free college,” cash transfers to students, or the redistribution of endowments—but discrimination is still widespread, “bending and twisting until it fits within the confines of the system it is given.”

A well-researched, potent, timely investigation of yet another element of systemic racism.