DeVos’ comments came after meeting with HBCU leaders from across the country at the White House to announce the Trump administration’s plan to increase funding to the colleges. “But today she says ‘they pioneered school choice, ‘ and had black presidents of historic black colleges standing around the Oval Office, saluting Donald Trump, while Kellyanne was on the couch all cuddled up, tweeting and carrying on”. In her statement, DeVos praised HBCU’s for providing opportunity to black students during a time when “there were too many students in America who did not have equal access to education”.
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HBCUs rose to prominence in the years after the Civil War and through Jim Crow, when public institutions still excluded black students – requiring the establishment of colleges where they could study.
“Yesterday’s attempt to whitewash the the stain of segregation into an argument for privatizing our public schools is perhaps a new low in her current position”, said the MI congressman John Conyers, who also called the statement “shocking and insulting”. #HBCUs remain at the forefront of opening doors that had previously been closed to so many. The functional choice HBCUs gave black students at the time of their founding was between black school and no school-which is to say, their advent did not provide black students with meaningful school choice at all.
Talk about tone deaf.
Tone-deaf, uninformed statement from DeVos. Black students graduate with 31% more college debt than their white peers.
Some social media users said DeVos ignored the history of how black Americans were denied access to higher education.
“I believe the Secretary was trying to connect her work with school choice and HBCUs”, Kimbrough told NBC News. They had to create their own institutions of higher learning. Though a handful of black students were enrolled at some private white colleges during segregation, for generations HBCUs were the only option open to black students seeking higher education. All Democrats and Independents, as well as two Republicans in the Senate, voted against confirming her.
Betsy DeVos needs to answer a very important question: Who taught her American history at her private school?
“I just want Oklahomans to know just down the street is an incredible university”, she said.
Ms. DeVos’s statement came as many in the HBCU community were eagerly anticipating President Trump’s executive order on HBCUs, expected to be signed on Tuesday afternoon.
Austin Lane, the president of Texas Southern University, a historically black university in Houston, who visited the White House Tuesday, also said that he was “puzzled” by the analogy.
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Others noted public HBCUs were generally not offered the same amount of funding and resources predominantly white colleges and universities received.
