A New Era for Mississippi’s Black Colleges

From a sixth-floor office overlooking 1,700 blooming acres, Clinton Bristow Jr. shared a vision--one that now verges on reality.

Bristow, president of Alcorn State University, a black college founded 130 years ago to teach ex-slaves how to grow cotton, wants to transform his rural campus into a bustling research center with state-of-the-art food science labs, health care programs and a special agribusiness degree that will attract the best students anywhere, black and white.

“That’s the 21st century way of education,” Bristow said as he gazed out his window across the tops of dogwood trees. “Alcorn is always going to be a predominantly black school, because those are our traditions and our traditions are strong. But race matters less to kids these days. And to compete for students of all types, we have to evolve.”

Evolution is precisely what’s in store for historically black colleges, one of the last publicly supported holdovers from the days of segregation and a distinctly Southern institution.

Nowhere is change going to come more dramatically than in Mississippi, which in the same week decided to keep its Confederate flag and shore up its black colleges.

Every state in the South opened schools like Alcorn during the Jim Crow era. And every state in the South has kept them open even though grammar schools are integrated, high schools are integrated and each year more and more black students head off to predominantly white colleges and universities.

But in Mississippi there’s been an especially intense attachment to a dual, almost duplicative, system of higher education. Mississippi, with the highest percentage of black residents of any state, 36%, has three predominantly black state schools and five mostly white ones.

Despite a well documented legacy of neglect, the black colleges continue to attract the majority of the state’s African American students and have become cherished depositories of black heritage.

Last week, the state agreed to spend $503 million to improve the three black schools--one of the largest desegregation settlements ever. The deal promises to end a sprawling 26-year-old lawsuit and may guide other Southern states struggling with the issue. But it came with this proviso: Black schools must become less black.

To gain control of all the settlement money, Alcorn, Jackson State and Mississippi Valley State will be required to enroll 10% nonblack students (or non-African American--it’s still up in the air how to count the few black exchange students from Africa).

Though educators have shied away from the using the words “quota” and “affirmative action,” many of the nation’s 120 historically black colleges have already launched outreach programs, including Alcorn.

“Hey, if the white schools are now going after my potential customers, I’d be remiss if I didn’t go after theirs,” Bristow said.

Some find this offensive. “Let me make sure I have this right,” said Mary Coleman, a political science professor at Jackson State. “After all these years of discriminating against us, people are now asking us to open our doors?”

The challenges toward integrating Southern state colleges are mighty. In Mississippi, it’s become like a well-worn rut in the road for white kids to follow where their parents went and black kids to do the same. Tuition is about $3,000 at all eight state schools, and admission standards are identical.

But Jackson State remains 95% black, as does Mississippi Valley State. The University of Mississippi is 82% white. Mississippi State is 75% white.

Alcorn, nestled in the rolling hills of southwest Mississippi, has the fastest growing nonblack student population, currently 8%. Many of those students are foreigners.

There’s a comfort level here among many politicians, educators and students about maintaining de facto segregation in higher education.

“Integration doesn’t mean we all have to be together,” said Gretchen Duffin, an African American senior at Alcorn. “It means we have the choice.”

The costs of such choice, of course, can be steep: duplication of administrations, libraries, football stadiums and other infrastructure needed to sustain essentially two parallel college systems.

For a small, relatively poor, state like Mississippi, “it wouldn’t make sense to have this system if we started out today,” said William Winter, a former governor and one of the state’s leading progressives. “But we can’t dismiss the historical factor for efficiency.”

To shut down or dilute black schools would endanger a crucial part of black heritage, said E. Ethelbert Miller of Howard University, a private college in Washington.

“The archives, the collections, the faculties, the dreams--of emancipated slaves and civil rights heroes--all this is stored on our campuses,” Miller said. “We derive a lot of pride from that.”

Black schools also offer shelter from bigotry and prejudice.

“If you’re tall and black, nobody at Howard is going to see you walking across campus and ask if you’re on the basketball team,” Miller added.

Also, many high school seniors simply want to taste the bona fide black college experience--the step-shows and big marching bands and black fraternities and sororities and shared music and fashion and traditions. It’s a nurturing culture that can take root at predominantly white schools but flourishes at black colleges.

“It just feels comfortable,” said Bobby Williams, valedictorian at Provine High School in Jackson. He has been accepted at several schools but is leaning toward a scholarship at Jackson State.

Not surprisingly, some white students see it differently. “Nobody talks to me,” said Terri Moreau, a nursing student at Alcorn. “When I’m in my classes, it’s fine, because there are other white students. But when I’m on the main campus, I feel like people avoid me.”

It was because Jackson State used to be so neglected, with few degree programs and slouching buildings, that the late Jake Ayers, a black sharecropper from the Delta, sued the state in 1975. His son was a Jackson State student, and Ayers claimed higher education in Mississippi was discriminatory because black schools received far fewer resources than white ones. Many black state colleges were founded after the Civil War to provide a vocational and intentionally inferior education.

The Justice Department joined the case, a huge class of black plaintiffs was certified, and after 26 years of hearings, a trial, a Supreme Court appeal and countless delays, the parties reached a settlement last week.

Negotiators appointed by Gov. Ronnie Musgrove offered $503 million, to be provided by the state Legislature, for the black schools over the next 17 years. The plaintiffs, led by Bennie G. Thompson, a black congressman from the Delta and a Jackson State alum, accepted.

Now it’s up to a federal judge to approve the deal, and hearings will be held over the next two months to discuss it. Louisiana and Alabama have agreed to similar but smaller settlements, while other Southern states have yet to litigate the issue. Of the 19 states that set up dual black and white public university systems, none has closed its black schools.

If the Ayers settlement is finalized, the money will be used to boost academic programs, improve facilities and build endowments at the black schools. Alcorn, for instance, has $12 million in the bank, compared with $169 million at Ole Miss.

The long-awaited support for the state’s three black colleges came just six days after Mississippi voted overwhelmingly in a referendum to keep the divisive Confederate battle cross on the state flag.

But, in a way, it’s for the same reason. “Nobody wants to part with their identity,” Bristow said. “Just like Notre Dame doesn’t want to change its fight song to something by B.B. King or the descendants of Civil War veterans didn’t want to lose their flag, we don’t want to give up a piece of ourselves either.”

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Times researcher Edith Stanley contributed to this story.