"A book that both taught me so much and also kept me on the
edge of my seat. It is an invaluable text from a supremely talented
writer." --Clint Smith, author of How
the Word is Passed
The definitive
history of the pervasiveness of racial inequality in American higher
education
America's
colleges and universities have a shameful secret: they have never
given Black people a fair chance to succeed. From its inception, our
higher education system was not built on equality or accessibility,
but on educating--and prioritizing--white students. Black students
have always been an afterthought. While governments and private
donors funnel money into majority white schools, historically Black
colleges and universities (HBCUs), and other institutions that have
high enrollments of Black students, are struggling to survive, with
state legislatures siphoning away federal funds that are legally owed
to these schools. In The State Must Provide, Adam Harris
reckons with the history of a higher education system that has
systematically excluded Black people from its benefits.
Harris
weaves through the legal, social, and political obstacles erected to
block equitable education in the United States, studying the Black
Americans who fought their way to an education, pivotal Supreme Court
cases like Plessy v. Ferguson and Brown v. Board of
Education, and the government's role in creating and upholding a
segregated education system. He explores the role that Civil War-era
legislation intended to bring agricultural education to the masses
had in creating the HBCUs that have played such a major part in
educating Black students when other state and private institutions
refused to accept them.
The
State Must Provide is the definitive chronicle of higher
education's failed attempts at equality and the long road still in
front of us to remedy centuries of racial discrimination--and poses a
daring solution to help solve the underfunding of HBCUs. Told through
a vivid cast of characters, The State Must Provide examines
what happened before and after schools were supposedly integrated in
the twentieth century, and why higher education remains broken to
this day.