HBCUs and the Election
By 
As Kamala Harris accepts the Democratic nomination for vice president, her fellow Howard alumni and graduates of other historically Black colleges and universities are gearing up to support her historic run. The Biden-Harris campaign, however, has yet to reveal how they plan to tap this active segment of the Black community — a core demographic they desperately need to turn out in high numbers in November.
The campaign has acknowledged Harris’ nomination as a boon for Black colleges across the country. Yet, given the wide influence that Black college graduates boast, failure to fully galvanize them would be a missed opportunity, some advocates say — especially as Black Democrats who were once on the fence about Harris begin to warm to her.
Ahead of the 2020 primary season, the Biden campaign launched the HBCUs for Biden initiative, aimed at garnering support among young Black voters. Co-chaired by three current HBCU students, the plan also folds in more than $70 billion in additional funding for Black colleges and universities — a monumental sum of money for the institutions, whose median endowment sits at $12 million. Biden has also proposed free tuition for public, four-year HBCUs as part of his “Build Back Better” plan.
And his ticket has some built-in support: Howard alumni rallied behind Harris during her 2016 senatorial campaign and 2020 primary run. Biden’s decision to add the California senator and former prosecutor to the Democratic ticket makes Harris not only the first Black woman to be a major party’s vice presidential nominee, but also the first graduate of an historically Black college or university (HBCU). It’s injected a new burst of energy into the HBCU community’s engagement with the presidential race.
“Howard really paved the way for a lot of the HBCUs and the significance of (Harris) being at the top of the ticket just really shows the value of HBCUs and … how transformational this would be for us,” said Charlie Lewis, a 1989 Howard graduate. “We have over 86,000 alums and we’re not all monolithic,” Lewis continued. “We come from all over the diaspora, the African diaspora. That’s unique. And she takes a part of that.”
This is not unprecedented.
People are sleeping on what effect HBCUs in general can have on the election in the South. People forget that the HBCU students in NC delivered Obama that state in 2008 #DCWatch https://t.co/MD4oR06tvR
— love mercy do justice (@c_fpeterson) August 20, 2020
I’m also glad that neither Biden nor Harris come from an Ivy League institution. Creating an entire elite political and legal class out of Harvard, Princeton, and Yale has been an outright disaster for this nation.