The State Must Provide

Why America's Colleges Have Always Been Unequal--And How to Set Them Right

Adam Harris

• Publisher: Ecco
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780062976499
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Discrimination & Race Relations
• Index: Social Sciences

"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.

Part I
Built

Chapter 1
The Roots

The letter began courteously, if not plainly fawning—but for good reason. On April 4, 1844, John Fee found himself writing to a man whom he had never met, though he had admired him from afar. From his perch in Bracken County, Kentucky—a place butting up to the Ohio River, hugging its northern neighbor, that a little more than seven thousand people called home—Fee walked a fine line as he dictated his entreaty.1 A Presbyterian minister by trade, Fee was looking for Cassius Marcellus Clay, the son of one of Kentucky’s wealthiest slaveholders, Green Clay.

Every family member Cassius Clay knew kept human beings in bondage. Growing up, he did not think much of it. He believed slavery was a harsh practice, but it was just the way things were. To him, it was a law of nature; something to turn your nose up at while sticking your hand out to reap its financial rewards.2 Then, in 1828, Clay’s father passed away and left him several enslaved people. Slavery was no longer simply his family’s problem—it was his own.

Clay left for college. He first attended Transylvania University in Kentucky, before transferring to Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. The ivy-strewn institution in the Northeast was three decades away from enrolling its first Black student, but it was fast developing a reputation3 as a training ground for prominent white abolitionists. It was 1831, and Simeon Jocelyn—a white pastor of the town’s Black congregation, and a former Yale student—had introduced plans to build a college for Black people in New Haven. Jocelyn enlisted the aid of William Lloyd Garrison, the fiery orator and founding editor of the abolitionist weekly The Liberator, to present the proposal. Jocelyn’s plan was shot down by the city council within three days. But Garrison’s time in New Haven was not for naught.

That fall, Cassius Clay heard Garrison speak for the first time. Garrison delivered a passionate address on the evils of human bondage and the morality of abolition. “In plain, logical, and sententious language he tread [slavery] so as to burn like a branding-iron into the most callous hide of the slaveholder and his defenders,” Clay later recalled. “As water to a thirsty wayfarer,”4 Clay drank Garrison’s speech. And then he acted on it. When he finished college and returned home, he emancipated the enslaved people his father had left to him. Those who stayed were paid a wage for their work. He had broken with his family and wore the name his white neighbors in the South thought treason: abolitionist. Some called Clay’s return to Kentucky and call for abolition a death wish; John Fee called it brave. And when he addressed Clay, he did so with admiration.

Fee had spent the first three months of 1844 trying to meet Clay in person. “Sir I am a stranger to you in person but I trust not to some of the emotions which move your philanthropic heart,”5 Fee wrote. He wanted to talk about slavery and their shared history. Both men were born to fathers who claimed men, women, and children—and the work of those people—as their own; both were sons of Kentucky; and both had learned to despise slavery in college. To Fee, slavery was a boil infecting the soul of each person who took part in it. Collectively, it left permanent stains on the country’s moral conscience. More fundamentally, it was a sin. And as a man of faith, Fee could not abide it. The thoughts he had bottled up for months poured onto the page.

After an extended history lesson on his own family, Fee pressed Clay. “By what mean or means do you suppose the slavery system in our state will be abolished?” he asked. Kentucky was viewed by some as the first domino poised to topple, due, in part, to its proximity to the free states. If Kentucky were to abolish slavery, other southern states might fall in line. Clay, as a former state representative who still held clout in the Whig Party, which had a blossoming antislavery wing, and as one of the wealthiest men in the state, could help urge the state along. Fee, and others in the state with whom he had spoken who were wedded to the cause of abolitionism, were counting on Clay. “They feel that God in his providence has raised you up to take a prominent place in the great work of disenthralling your country of its greatest curse—your fellow man from their greatest calamity,”6 Fee wrote.

As he wound his appeal to a close, Fee knew better than to expect a response. But if Clay felt moved to reply, he wrote, it could be the beginning of a bountiful relationship.

Occasionally a shot in the dark hits its mark, and Fee’s letter was the catalyst for a friendship between the two men. It was a friendship built on despising slavery, a friendship that would be tested as the country careened into Civil War. Ultimately, it was a bond that led to the formation of the first integrated, coeducational college in the southern United States—a beacon of educational equality in America.

Fee had been an on-again, off-again resident of Bracken County since he was born there in the fall of 1816. His father, John, was a farmer, one who trafficked in the purchase and sale of human beings. By his son’s recollection,7 John owned as many as thirteen enslaved people. His son was generous to his father in remembering why he participated in the “sinful” institution. “He saw the effects of slavery were bad; that it was a hindrance to social and national prosperity,” Fee wrote of his father.8 The elder Fee did not see an end to slavery in sight, even though he himself had married a Quaker’s daughter—the Quakers had petitioned to abolish slavery since 1790—and purchased land for his children in free states.9

As a child, Fee was not deeply moved by human bondage. “By false teaching unreflective youth can be led to look upon moral monstrosities as harmless,” he remembered. And the false teachings were everywhere. At church, pastors would explain the biblical justifications for slavery.10 In the community, people would sing its virtues. Even guests at the Fee family’s dinner table would pray for slavery’s longevity.

Fee’s revelation came in 1830. A minister, Joseph Corlis, began teaching at a subscription school—a private school—in the area and stayed with the Fees. He began inviting young John to Presbyterian services with him. Engaging with Corliss, “I was deeply convicted of sin, and gave myself to God,” Fee wrote. At least part of that sin, to Fee, was his family’s slaveholding. He carried guilt with him to Augusta College, in Bracken County, and then to Miami University, in Ohio, before returning to Augusta to finish his undergraduate schooling. But it was not until he enrolled at Lane Theological Seminary, in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1842, that his conviction turned into action.11

There were fewer than three hundred permanent colleges and universities12 in the United States in the middle of the nineteenth century. The figure would be dwarfed by the thousands of colleges that came to exist over the next 150 years, but it seemed astronomical in comparison to the time when George Washington, Benjamin Rush, Thomas Jefferson, and other Founding Fathers were imagining what American institutions of higher education could and should be.

In his first address before Congress in January 1790, shortly after North Carolina joined the Union, George Washington told lawmakers that “there is nothing, which can better deserve your patronage, than the promotion of Science and Literature. Knowledge is in every Country the surest basis of happiness.”13 It would now be considered a pedestrian ask for congressional funding if not for its roots. The Founders had been mulling ways to create national character and spread teachings that would bind people in the new nation together. Several of the Founders, Washington, James Madison, and Rush among them, came to the idea that the best way to create good citizens was through higher education. For the most part, this would be limited exclusively to white men, but at least one founder, Rush, allowed that women should be educated as well. Outside of the principles of liberty and government, however, his vision limited women’s education to housekeeping and sewing.14

As the number of institutions of higher education grew over the next several decades, the question of what it meant to be a good citizen in a democracy became even more important. Did it mean adhering to the nation’s custom and abiding by slavery? Or did it mean pushing back against it? The moral bent of professors at some Christian institutions—and at s...