GeeDee215

It was a little bit of both, actually. The college was created in the late 1890s for the children of black folks who came to the region to work the mines; those young people weren’t allowed to attend the segregated schools in the area. There wasn’t a single white student until the 1950s, when white folks coming back from Korea with G.I. Bill money started enrolling. At first it was a trickle, but by the late 1960s, the school was about half-black and half-white.

From 1966 to 1968, racial tensions at Bluefield State were mounting. In 1966, the state appointed Wendell Hardway to run the college — the first white president the institution had ever had. He promptly proceeded to hire 24 new instructors, all of whom were white. And he was the first Bluefield State president who didn’t live in Hatter Hall, the house in the center of campus named after the college’s black founder. This didn’t sit well with a lot of the black students and alumni, who thought the state was trying to change the school into something unrecognizable.

Then, in 1968, some radical black students bombed the gym. Hardway swiftly responded by shutting down the dorms. He said the bombing had been stoked by trouble-maker students from up North. But the dorms were almost all black — white people in the town wouldn’t rent to black kids — which meant that black kids suddenly had no place to stay.

The school essentially became a commuter school, and since West Virginia is one of the whitest states in the country (94 percent white), the campus started to look more and more like the state more broadly.

Think back to 60 years ago, pre-Brown v. Board of Education, when in many cases black folks weren’t even allowed to attend colleges or universities unless they were schools like Bluefield State. The middle of the 20th century was one of our nation’s most productive periods, and black folk were shut out of it by law and custom. They couldn’t buy homes or go to the colleges they wanted and couldn’t apply for jobs. We’re still dealing with the consequences of that — the wealth gap is the most obvious example.

Remember, this is in living memory. When we went to Bluefield State’s homecoming, there were alumni in attendance who were around during those pre-integration days. Schools like Bluefield State were vital to creating a black professional class, and historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) still graduate a disproportionate amount of black people in STEM fields, teachers, lawyers and judges.

What we deal with all the time is that those longstanding historical realities as well as current disparities still very much affect the way people of different ethnic groups currently live.

That’s because you’re an independent woman who don’t need no man and I respect your mind and abilities.

But I was open to learning, Shereen. That’s the important part.

Bluefield State’s total budget is around $20 million. About a tenth of that budget comes from its designation as an HBCU.

The federal government designates schools as HBCUs if they were created with the primary purpose of educating black students before 1964. And once you’ve been grandfathered in, you have that status forever (or until they change the rules). That’s why a school like Bluefield State, which is 90 percent white, maintains its HBCU designation, while a school like Chicago State University, which after 1964 became overwhelmingly black, isn’t eligible for the federal support that goes to HBCUs.