Black Colleges Woo Students Alienated by Prop. 209

On the day the U.S. Supreme Court gave California the green light to implement Proposition 209, the president of Fisk University was paying a long-awaited visit to Crenshaw High School.

Not only did Rutherford H. Adkins fly from Nashville, Tenn., to tell students about Fisk, he came bearing gifts. After his pitch, he called forward three of Crenshaw’s top students and announced that each would receive a substantial scholarship if they attend Fisk.

With the end of affirmative action and what some consider shrinking educational opportunities, supporters of black colleges are reaching out to California students with a new sense of urgency.

“With 209 in place, some Californians may feel that their opportunities for higher education are lost,” Adkins said. “It’s a fortunate accident that we are here today, to let them know that there are opportunities elsewhere. One of those places is Fisk University.”

The timing of the visit may have been coincidental, but ensuring that California students are aware of historically black colleges and universities is deliberate.

Black colleges’ supporters are reaching beyond students who may not be eligible for Cal State and UC schools without affirmative action. The state’s brightest students are also hearing the call to consider historically black colleges. And some, such as Maurice Cooper of San Jose, who graduated in May from a prestigious preparatory school in the Bay Area, are doing just that.

“I was, for some time, looking at [California schools],” said Cooper, 18, a freshman in the honors program at Atlanta’s Morehouse College. “But I think the perception, ‘They don’t want us anyway,’ helped to solidify my decision to go out of state.”

UC officials have predicted a serious drop--50% to 70% at UCLA and UC Berkeley--in African Americans and Latinos admitted to the 165,000-student system when the ban on affirmative action goes into full effect next fall.

Although UC officials say it is too early to determine where next year’s high school graduates will enroll, some observers say they have already seen more interest in the black colleges.

“There seems to be a more conscious effort on the parts of students to research historically black colleges than ever before,” said Crenshaw High School counselor Cassandra Roy. “I’m pretty certain 209 had something to do with that.”

Effects of Ban on Affirmative Action

The impact of the ban was seen at medical and law schools this fall. The entering class at UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law included only one African American, a student who had been admitted previously but deferred enrolling. All of the 14 black students who were offered admission this year declined to attend.

In an August letter to Boalt Hall alumni, law school Dean Herma Kay Hill acknowledged that some minority students who were admitted but chose not to attend expressed concerns about Proposition 209. Others, she said, went elsewhere for personal reasons. All but one of the 14 African Americans admitted chose to go to prestigious law schools, she said.

“The fact is, we have never been very successful in attracting the most sought after students from underrepresented minorities for a more basic reason: We have not been able to provide scholarship support at a level comparable to other leading law schools,” Hill wrote. “This year was no exception.”

An organization of African American law students at Boalt argues, however, that past classes have included black students who were sought after just as much as the 14 who declined to enroll this year.

Former Rep. William Gray III, who heads the United Negro College Fund, said the fact that students--even those who could be accepted at a UC campus--have started looking outside the state is a predictable outcome.

“I don’t understand why the supporters of 209 are surprised when minority enrollment drops,” Gray said. “They shouldn’t be surprised when they send a message to minority kids that you’re not wanted.”

For the last five to 10 years, black colleges have experienced record growth, Gray said. Students select the schools for a variety of reasons, from low cost to comfort. And Californians are the fastest-growing population on United Negro College Fund campuses.

“These are kids who have been accepted at UCLA, UC San Diego, Berkeley, some even Stanford,” Gray said. “They’re making this choice.”

At Morehouse, students from California make up 11% to 13% of the student body each year, second only to students from Georgia.

“I think 209 is going to uncover new recruits for us, people who are going to look our way who haven’t done so in the past,” said Morehouse vice provost Sterling Hudson.

The UC system now faces the problem of finding a way to convince admissible African American and Latino students that they are wanted.

“We want to emphasize that the welcome mat is out on all of our campuses for students of the whole range of California backgrounds,” said Margaret Heisel, director of University Outreach and Student Affairs. “Our goal is to be a diverse university serving a diverse state, just as we have in the past.”

Heisel said the UC system has expanded its outreach, using current students and alumni as recruiters. It is also encouraging applicants to consider UC campuses other than Berkeley and UCLA. Of those students who apply to three or more campuses, 86% are admitted to at least one of the schools, she said.

But whether a student who is accepted at a Howard University in Washington or a Morehouse will choose a UC Irvine or even a UCLA is a thornier question for UC officials.

In recent years, Heisel said, university officials have been aware of “a very lively interest among African American students in historically black colleges.”

Supporters say these schools offer students a solid education in a nurturing environment--one in which their intellectual ability is not automatically questioned and their presence on campus is not part of an acrimonious debate.

“We’re saying, even though you’re able to go to a UC Berkeley, the kind of environment you may get there now is not going to be the way it used to be because there will be fewer of you,” said Solomon Banks, president of the Tuskegee University Alumni Assn. in Los Angeles.

Banks, director of housing for the Los Angeles Housing Department, remembers Tuskegee as a place that carefully nurtured and molded him.

“I want to do everything I can to make sure other students can participate in that,” he said.

The work of alumni groups, recruiters, tour groups and high school counselors are often students’ first introduction to these institutions.

Although these groups have long sought to make students aware of historically black colleges, the anti-affirmative action movement has given new meaning to their work.

‘Nurturing Atmosphere’

Gregory Delahoussaye and his wife, Yasmin, operate the North Hills-based Educational Student Tours, which takes young people on visits to black colleges.

Many of the students who go on the tours have never stepped foot on the campus of a historically black college before, and they return “with a new awareness and sense of themselves,” said Crenshaw High counselor Roy.

“Once they see people like themselves seriously involved in higher learning, they come back more focused and more seriously determined to go to a four-year school,” she said.

The Delahoussayes’ tours have taken more than 1,000 students to historically black colleges since the couple began the trips in 1989. They see the post-Proposition 209 era as a time of crisis, and are searching for ways to reach more students and to subsidize trips for those unable to pay.

Increasingly, families who seek out the tours want their children “any place other than California,” said Yasmin Delahoussaye, dean of student services at Los Angeles Valley College.

“I see more and more people leaving California, even if they don’t go to a black college,” she said.

Everyone expected Maurice Cooper, 1997 student body president at prestigious Bellarmine College Preparatory school in San Jose, to follow the path of other graduates straight into the halls of an Ivy League or UC campus. One of only six African American students in his class, Cooper scored 1240 on his SAT exam.

During his junior year, he visited black campuses on a tour organized by Carl Ray of San Jose, who once charged 45 plane tickets on his credit card to take a group of students to Alabama’s Tuskegee University, his alma mater.

After visiting Morehouse, Cooper decided to enroll.

“It was the nurturing atmosphere that I felt, that I hadn’t felt at any other college,” Cooper said.

The ban on affirmative action “was very discouraging,” he said. “Even though I don’t think [it] would have affected us in 1997, the fact that the UC system and schools in California were taking that kind of approach did not make me feel comfortable.”

The honors program at Morehouse is rigorous, and Cooper said he has not been disappointed, academically or otherwise.

“There’s a strong emphasis on developing character and not just intellect,” he said. “That’s something that I know isn’t the concentration of many of the major institutions in America.”

Bianca Araya, 17, who went on a tour with the Delahoussayes last year, does not expect to attend a California campus, not for fear that she will not be admitted but because of what she experienced when she visited black schools, she said.

“There’s support and guidance, and they want you to succeed,” she said.

If students are impressed by the sense of nurturing found on black campuses, they are equally struck by the absence of what Gray called “the presumption of inferiority and lack of qualifications.”

“That’s a problem black and Hispanic students face when they go to majority institutions,” he said.

Kenneth Christmon, director of admissions at Ohio’s Wilberforce University, has visited Los Angeles schools with presentations that mix recruitmentand lessons in living with a push for black collegesand the pursuit of higher education.

“Society sends us enough messages about who we are and what we’re about,” he said. “Often the message is negative. My effort is to inspire, to motivate and to positively program them that they can make it.”

With or without Proposition 209, Emilio Ortega, a Morehouse freshman, was headed to a historically black college.

In high school, he said, “I always had to prove myself--not only myself but my race. I was in a lot of honors classes, and I was always the only black student.”

On every issue, from affirmative action to rap music to style of dress, he said, he tried hard not to fulfill the stereotypical image of black males.

At Morehouse, he said, “I felt I no longer had to do that. . . . I felt comfortable.”

According to Gray, half of black corporate executives did undergraduate work at a black college as did 70% of the nation’s black physicians.

Historically, black colleges and universities have been willing to accept marginal students, often the first in the family to attend college, “but who in four years graduate with distinction and go on to America’s major graduate schools,” Gray said.

But the idea that all these students have been rejected by other schools is a misconception, he said. The population includes children of “black superachievers.”

“The children of the black elite are doing exactly what the Irish, Italian and Jewish immigrant children of the third and fourth generation did,” Gray said. “They said, ‘I want to go back to Notre Dame, to Georgetown, to Brandeis,’ when they had been accepted to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford.”

There is a certain irony inherent in so many descendants of that generation of African Americans, who left the South in the 1940s and 1950s for California’s promised land, now looking at out-of-state colleges because of Proposition 209.

“I’m not happy about the potential for black colleges to benefit from this kind of event in American life,” Gray said. “Just as it would not be good for Catholic kids to get a message, ‘You’re really not wanted here. Go back to Catholic colleges,’ which was the message 75 years ago.

“I do not wish to see . . . exclusion of opportunities for African Americans, Hispanic Americans and others from majority institutions.”

Even with a genuine effort on the part of individuals and UC campuses to inform black and brown students that they are wanted, prospective students hear more loudly the divisive message sent by the regents and the governor, said Pasadena attorney Richard Russell, a former UC regent.

“The fact of the matter is, we’re going to lose at least a generation of students,” Russell said. “If I were a student right now, I’d be very hard pressed to want to apply to the University of California.”