Just hours after Donald Trump was sworn in as America’s 45th president, the tricky political relationship between Republican presidents and historically black colleges and universities was already on display.
Talladega College, one of the 105 black colleges dotting the United States, seized on the rare opportunity for its marching band to participate in a presidential inaugural parade, raising nearly $700,000 in the process. Its presence also served as a symbolic gesture of inclusion for a newly elected president who has faced persistent accusations of racial intolerance. On campus and beyond, Talladega’s decision was deeply controversial—even alumni were overwhelmingly opposed to the school participating—and spurred a debate over whether the exposure and experience was worth being viewed as a political prop.
In the tenuous relationship between Republican leaders and historically black schools, this is the way it has been for a long time. Politics makes for strange bedfellows—as is undoubtedly true of Trump and Talladega—but the blend of political expediency and areas of ideological overlap have proved a strong enough elixir to bring the two together and sustain a relationship over time. Together, they march to their own beat.
Of course, relationships forged out of expedience do not often lead to lasting bonds of friendship. But, to paraphrase Henry Kissinger, it’s not about friends, but interests—both political and financial.
Historically black colleges and universities—those institutions of higher education founded prior to 1964 with the principal mission of educating black Americans excluded from segregated public and private universities—have never enjoyed levels of public funding comparable with other institutions. This persistent inequality has led some states, including Maryland and Mississippi, to be sued for failing to fund black and white public colleges at equal levels. With monetary resources at a premium, the leaders of black colleges cannot afford to sit out the opportunity to build a relationship with the president of the United States—regardless of whether that person is a Democrat or Republican.
For Republican presidents, such relationships offer the possibility to address a different kind of shortage: the ongoing lack of support for the GOP among African-Americans. Since Republican presidents routinely fare poorly among black voters, they tend to be open to facile gestures (both symbolic and meaningful) to combat perceptions of their party’s racial animus—particularly with institutions that don’t disrupt conservative narratives. As it happens, historically black schools have a tradition of cultural conservatism, respectability politics and bootstrapping, all of which make them deeply attractive (and viable) targets for Republican outreach.
February 2017, Trump’s first full month in office, began with the president marking the first day of Black History Month by holding a “listening session” with a small clutch of black Republicans. According to attendees, Trump’s interest in black colleges piqued when he was told that President Barack Obama had a rocky relationship with them. For Trump, the prospect of besting Obama was too appealing to ignore: days later, the Trump administration indicated that a major executive order on historically black universities was imminent.
That outreach takes another step on Tuesday, hours before Trump gives his first speech to a joint session of Congress. Representatives and allies of his administration, including Senator Tim Scott (R-S.C.) and two-time HBCU graduate and Apprentice contestant-turned-presidential aide Omarosa Manigault, will meet with more than 85 presidents of black colleges to discuss “opportunity, strengthening relationships and the importance of HBCUs.” Will Trump’s interest wane once the convening ends, or will he follow in the footsteps of his Republican forebears?
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Republicans and HBCU presidents have a long history. More than 100 years ago, a black man dined socially at the White House for the first time when Booker T. Washington, the president of Tuskegee Institute, visited Republican President Theodore Roosevelt. Washington’s position on race—preferring to prioritize black self-improvement and economic development over demands for immediate and full equality—made him agreeable to Roosevelt. But it was Washington’s political influence among some white Southerners that caused the president to violate an established social norm. The dinner, which became a national scandal, occurred because Roosevelt sought Washington’s help in identifying potential political appointments and laying the groundwork for his 1904 campaign. And with the president’s ear, Washington had a direct line to the White House and national standing that led to philanthropic investments in his education programs.
Today’s Republican Party, however, is quite different than Roosevelt’s, having been ushered into its current era of politics by Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign. But the relationship’s DNA remains fundamentally unchanged.
President Richard Nixon built his political approach to black America around notions of black capitalism and self-empowerment, which New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller called a “stroke of political genius.” Supporting black business and HBCUs gave Nixon a message to appeal to white moderates and a counternarrative to Democrats who were hitting him hard on his “Southern strategy” tactics, like opposing school desegregation and busing, to win over socially conservative white voters. Ever the political schemer, Nixon pursued duplicitous tactics, like packaging an increase in HBCU funding into Republican legislation that cut education spending overall. In this way, when congressional Democrats voted against Nixon’s measure, he could accuse them of hypocrisy and chastise them for not supporting black colleges.
But black colleges realized actual gains under Nixon. In 1969, Bob Brown—a member of Nixon’s Black Cabinet, a small group of black Republican appointees who pushed an agenda aimed at middle-class African-Americans—noted that black colleges received only 3 percent of the $4 billion allocated annually to higher education. He arranged for Nixon to meet with more than a dozen black college presidents, and the session resulted in Nixon promising more than $100 million in federal funds for black colleges, with an additional $30 million being allocated the following year. In all, due to such increased funding, black Republican appointees were largely responsible for driving more than $1 billion to black schools over the next decade.
Likewise, Ronald Reagan, whose 1980 campaign aimed to win 20 percent of the black vote, seized on Democratic missteps post-Nixon to use support for black colleges as a wedge issue. President Jimmy Carter was under fire for not keeping pace with the expansive financial support that Nixon had granted black colleges earlier in the 1970s. Since black turnout was central to Carter’s reelection hopes, he issued an executive order in August 1980 to increase funding for black schools. But the following month, when a march down Pennsylvania Avenue was held for Black College Day, it was Reagan, at the urging of his black staffers and journalist Tony Brown, who jumped at the opportunity to endorse it. Reagan’s support politicized the event. The march became controversial, dividing black politicians and black colleges’ students and faculty in the process.
Again, however, there were some actual gains for black colleges under Reagan. During the first year of Reagan’s presidency, he held a White House luncheon for the colleges’ leaders, where he announced an increase in funding to HBCUs despite budget cuts elsewhere. He also signed executive orders establishing the White House Initiative on Historically Black Colleges and Universities, still in existence today, and created National Black College Week. In 1982, Reagan commended leaders of black colleges for working with him to save Meharry Medical College, the first Southern medical school for African-Americans. And, interestingly, he headlined a fundraiser that year at Howard University, where he recognized the $20,000 donation to the school by Rich DeVos, the billionaire Amway co-founder and father-in-law of current Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos—whose first act as secretary earlier this month was to meet with Howard University leadership. By 1986, Reagan had increased all-in federal funding to black colleges by 15 percent, reaching $629 million in 1985.
But these positive developments don’t tell the whole story. The education cuts that came with increased institutional funding of black colleges had large, negative effects on black students. Cuts to student-aid programs like Pell Grants, which were slashed significantly during the Reagan years, contributed to the decreased enrollment at black colleges for most of the decade. And some proponents of black colleges argued that the increased federal funding was concentrated in lump sums to just a few schools. As Alan Kirschner of the United Negro College Fund put it in 1984, “Schools like Howard University and Tuskegee Institute have gotten very significant grants, which have inflated the figures, but most schools are getting far less funds than in previous administrations before the Reagan years because of student aid cuts, and they’re hurting."
More than two decades later, President Obama drew heat from HBCUs for taking actions similar to Reagan. In 2011, education officials enacted stricter credit requirements for the Parent PLUS student loan program that disproportionately affected black college students—nearly 30,000 lost loans for the academic year. And though overall targeted funding to black colleges increased during Obama’s presidency, the changes to Pell Grants and student loans credit-worthiness standards precipitated a 10 percent drop in HBCU enrollment from 2010 to 2014. Only last year did enrollment began rebounding.
These harsh realities of dealing with the federal government, however, do not make the case for ceasing engagement altogether. As long as White Houses can spot political advantages in supporting black colleges, they will continue to do so, at least to an extent. Those schools’ presidents know that there is more to lose by not being invited to the table at all: As they see it, in politics, sometimes you have to dance with the one that brought you.
