Boston City Councilors who want to bring a satellite campus of an HBCU, or a Historically Black College and University, to the city held a council hearing Tuesday evening to solicit community members’ thoughts on the matter.
Roughly two dozen Boston residents, HBCU graduates, students, and educators testified before the council Tuesday and expressed a range of reactions to the idea. While many were enthusiastically supportive, others were hesitant, and some posed questions to the councilors, such as whether a satellite campus would be able to replicate the cultural support and community, as well as the historical relevance, of an established HBCU.
Councilor Brian Worrell, the lead sponsor of the initiative, emphasized that bringing an HBCU satellite campus to Boston could be a powerful way to support and invest in Black students, and help bring more diversity to Boston’s key industries, from tech and health care, to education and engineering.
“These industries determine who’s building and designing our homes, who’s teaching our children, who’s providing medical care to our families, and who’s shaping public policy, and in every one of these sectors, we see underrepresentation at every level,” Worrell said. “These gaps begin in our classrooms. That’s what we need to change, and that’s what an HBCU presence in Boston can help us address.”
While more than two dozen colleges and universities are already based in Boston, none of them are an HBCU. HBCUs, as defined by the Higher Education Act of 1965, are nationally accredited, historically Black colleges that were established prior to 1964, for the purpose of educating Black Americans at a time when many universities discriminated against, or did not admit, Black students.
Many HBCU graduates, and some current HBCU students, spoke passionately in favor of the idea of bringing a satellite HBCU campus to Boston, citing their own personal experiences.
Sixty-five year old Edwin Sumpter told the councilors he has lived in Boston his entire life, except for the two years he spent as a student at Johnson C. Smith University, an HBCU in Charlotte, North Carolina.
“I had no idea how those two years would really shape me as an individual, as an African American, and instill a pride in me and show me a side of African American life that I only read about, or occasionally saw on TV,” Sumpter said, emphasizing that he supports Worrell’s proposal to bring an HBCU satellite campus to Boston.
Considering “the rich history we do have in this city, around the African American experience and education, the needs that I do feel we do have, especially in my neighborhoods where I’ve grown up, in terms of impacting our young folks, [it] makes more and more sense,” he continued.
Autumn Souto, who works as an enrollment and outreach coordinator with the METCO program, said a lot of METCO and BPS students right now are leaving Boston to attend HBCUs.
“It’s really a pivotal moment in their lives to really feel welcomed in an institution where they feel seen, where they have the space to be their authentic selves,” Souto said. ”For them to have the opportunity to have something right here in Boston, where they have their roots, where they have their families, where they’ve built their communities, can be very pivotal in their their education, their careers, and whatever they choose to do in their futures.”
But some residents expressed concern about establishing an HBCU satellite campus in the city, without first investing the necessary resources into supporting Black students and improving educational outcomes in BPS.
“How are you going to place that in the city of Boston with the progress that needs to be done?” asked Russell Glover, a lifelong Bostonian who said he lived through the busing era. “How are we going to benefit from this HBCU coming to Boston? Is it going to be for outsiders? Because how is that going to serve our purpose?”
Others worried about bringing an HBCU satellite campus to Boston with the Trump administration in the White House, when HBCUs could face severe financial harm from federal funding cuts to Pell Grants. Some asked about whether such a proposal would involve financial support for students, especially considering Boston’s high cost of living.
Jonathan Jefferson, the president of Roxbury Community College, emphasized that had RCC been founded just a few years earlier, it would have had the formal HBCU designation. In practice, with a student body that is 80 percent Black, RCC is Boston’s HBCU, he said.
“Please understand that if you want your HBCU, then build it at the one that you already have,” Jefferson said. “We are bringing in the HBCUs to the Commonwealth. Let us do that, work with us, support us, and let’s build a bigger, better HBCU.”
Worrell told the Globe he’s been having conversations and meetings with stakeholders for some time now to explore how to move forward on the idea. But he wanted to hold Tuesday’s hearing to get community feedback, and use it to shape how the city approaches the issue. He fully intends to incorporate all the ideas in concerns into his plan, including making existing stakeholders key parts of the effort.
“There’s no one way, right, on how to get the results that we’re looking for,” Worrell said. “My whole vision of this is to make sure that there’s community at the table, there’s institutions at the table, while we’re creating or formulating this idea.”
