As Different as DAY and NIGHT - Brief Article

Black Issues in Higher Education, Jan 6, 2000 by Arlene Levinson

Missouri's historically Black Lincoln University, now predominantly White, searches for a way to bring its two divergent populations together.

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. -- There's a saying here at, Lincoln University: "White by day, Black by night." A hilly, picturesque campus with 3,343 students enrolled this fall, Lincoln was founded by Black Civil War veterans. It was once revered as the Black Harvard of the Midwest. Today, the school is 70 percent White. Yet when night falls, many Whites clear out.

Blacks dominate the dorms, the frats and sororities, most social activities and, after graduating, the alumni association. Whites, a presence since the 1950s, complain they feel unwelcome.

Some, like Heather Raithel, prefer the unofficial White student union -- a study hall in a building named for Martin Luther King Jr.

There's little evidence of tension. It's more polite avoidance.

"They're over there, and we're over here," Raithel, 21, an elementary education major, explained.

Decades after segregation was outlawed, it persists at Lincoln. Only now, it's not laws but a social wall that separates people. That wall, built by history, is buttressed indirectly by tax dollars.

Lincoln is among the nation's 104 historically Black colleges and universities and endorsed as such by the federal government. HBCUs serve 280,000 students in 20 states, Washington, D.C., and the U.S. Virgin Islands. With a legacy of slavery and legal segregation, the schools are singled out for their continuing mission to educate African Americans. About 70 percent of students at HBCUs are at state-supported institutions like Lincoln, though a majority of HBCUs are private.

The schools receive special funding -- $180 million in the federal budget just adopted. The money is provided under a law Congress enacted in 1965 to protect and promote HBCUs' "unique role of educating Black, educationally disadvantaged and low-income students."

Every president since Jimmy Carter has also helped HBCUs; President Clinton created an office to aid their access to federal programs. Yet at least 15 HBCUs now educate a sizeable White enrollment.

At historically Black Kentucky State University in Frankfort, Ky., African Americans make up 73 percent of 1,722 full-time students, but less than 22 percent of 671 part-time students, according to the state Council on Postsecondary Education.

Lincoln is one of three HBCUs where Blacks are the minority. But it reflects a trend that ranges from Bluefield State College in West Virginia, where Blacks make up just 9 percent of 2,400 students, to Winston-Salem State University in North Carolina, where Blacks make up 80 percent of the 2,800 students.

Reasons for the trend vary. Blacks have more choice today than they once did. Geography plays a part. Stigmas fade. Civil rights lawsuits are pressing some HBCUs to raise White enrollment, just as traditionally White schools must bring in more Blacks. Tennessee State University must produce 50 percent White enrollment under a 1984 court order. It's now less than 20 percent.

The U.S. government also pushes states to put their public Black colleges and universities on equal footing with traditionally White ones -- so that they're academically indistinguishable. No racial quota is needed to maintain special federal funds. But officials in Washington notice the shift.

"That is a developing policy issue," says Claudio Prieto, acting assistant U.S. secretary of education for higher education. Speaking in a recent interview, he added that no funding change is planned.

But what about places like Lincoln, which are divided over their identity?

"In a very general sense, if people wish to segregate themselves, should the government support it or fight it? The answer is, `I don't know,'" Prieto says. "It depends on who the people are, and the factors going on around them."

It was once a crime in Missouri to teach a Black person to read and write. When Black Union veterans donated more than $5,000 to establish Lincoln in 1866, some could not sign their names:

Industrial skills were stressed then, along with study. But by early last century, as Missouri's only four-year public college open to Blacks, Lincoln rose to prominence with faculty educated at Harvard, Columbia, Cornell and the like.

Until 1954, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled segregated grade schools illegal, Lincoln was all Black. Within months, Lincoln's board of curators voted to admit Whites.

In those years, Lincoln students mixed freely in social activities. Whites joined Black students trying to integrate Jefferson City's bowling alleys, movie theaters and restaurants.

"It was new," Adrienne Hoard, class of '70 recalled. "In the '60s, people were more open to do the uncomfortable."

Hoard, who is Black and teaches fine art and art education at the vast and vastly richer University of Missouri 30 miles north, says this fascination with something new didn't last. "Society is still segregated," she says.

It's no wonder Lincoln students don't mix well. "We're asking these institutions to do things the society has not done."