HBCU Alumni Have a Profound Reason to Support Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library — and It Isn’t Charity

Posted on August 28, 2026 by | Leave a comment

 “If I’m remembered 100 years from now, I hope it will be not for looks but for books.” – Ms. Dolly Parton

Every homecoming, a knot of alumni takes the same walk back onto campus past the same block, the same porches, the same children playing in yards a few hundred feet from the gates they once walked through themselves. Most years they don’t really see them. They’re thinking about the game, the cookout, the faces they haven’t seen since spring. But those children live only steps from the campus that shaped them, closer than any of them ever stopped to notice while they were students there. Their future and the institution’s are already tangled together whether anyone admits it or not. Some of them will never walk through those gates themselves — not for lack of promise, but because no one made sure they could read well before they turned six, and by the time it shows up as a problem, everyone treats it as someone else’s failure to fix. A fence line, or sometimes just a street, is all that separates the campus that made them from the community raising the children who could be next. This year, walking that same route, one of them finally says it out loud. By Monday, the group has pulled the zip code. It’s already moving through the group chat; who’s in, who’s giving what, who’s setting up the recurring charge tonight. Each of them commits to a standing monthly gift, on their own, no chapter paperwork needed. By next year’s homecoming, they’re not just showing up, they’re telling everyone else in that same group chat’s orbit to do the same.

That is the structural story hiding inside a straightforward piece of philanthropic news. On August 25, Dolly Parton died at 80 after a battle with cancer, and within hours her Imagination Library, the nonprofit that has mailed more than 300 million free books to children from birth to age five since 1995, pledged to continue operating without her. It has strong reason to reassure the public. In the months before her death, Indiana and Missouri, two of the program’s largest state partners, cut a combined $10 million in public funding, and the effects were immediate: Missouri froze new enrollment on July 1 after lawmakers cut its allocation from roughly $6 million to $2 million, and Indiana dropped a $6 million two-year commitment that had reached more than 152,000 children, about 37 percent of the state’s under-five population, leaving a private fundraising campaign to close the gap.

It is worth being precise about why this particular loss registers differently across Black America than the death of most entertainers would. Parton’s standing in Black communities was not incidental goodwill; it was built through specific, repeated decisions over four decades. When Whitney Houston’s 1992 cover of “I Will Always Love You” generated an estimated $10 million in royalties for Parton, she used part of that windfall to purchase a commercial complex in a predominantly Black Nashville neighborhood, a property she later called, in her own words, “the house that Whitney built.” She was among the first public figures to advocate openly for people living with HIV and AIDS in the 1980s, when the subject carried real professional risk. In 2020 she voiced unambiguous support for the principle behind Black Lives Matter, and that same year donated $1 million to Vanderbilt University Medical Center toward coronavirus research that fed into the Moderna vaccine, a contribution not framed as racial-justice philanthropy but one that mattered disproportionately to Black communities carrying a disproportionate share of COVID-19’s toll. When Beyoncé reworked “Jolene” on Cowboy Carter in 2024, Parton publicly welcomed it rather than guarding the song as untouchable. Her death drew tributes from Black cultural and political figures across generations, including the nation’s first Black president. None of that history makes the Imagination Library a Black institution, and this publication has no interest in overstating it. But it explains why the erosion of one of her signature programs is being felt in Black America as something closer to institutional loss than celebrity news and why the ecosystem she consistently, unsentimentally invested in is well positioned to be the one that protects what she built.

The Imagination Library’s funding architecture is worth understanding before arguing that HBCU alumni should engage with it. The Dollywood Foundation covers national administrative overhead; local partners; usually a nonprofit, library system, or community foundation, fund the actual books and postage for their coverage area; and in many states, a public appropriation matches what the local partner raises, typically on a fifty-fifty basis. This is a genuinely decentralized model, closer in structure to a franchise network than a single national charity, and it is precisely because of that structure that state-level political decisions can gut service in one place while leaving it untouched in another. Missouri’s cut is the sharper illustration: in 2024 the state became the first in the country to fully fund the program, delivering 1.9 million books in a single year, and this year’s reduction converted a national model program into a waitlist. Indiana’s cut removed the largest state contribution the program had, and while the governor’s wife has since run a private campaign that had reached roughly 90 percent of its two-year replacement goal by March, the shortfall illustrates a pattern this publication has tracked in other contexts: public commitments to Black and working-class communities are frequently the first line item removed when budgets tighten, and private philanthropy is expected to backfill on short notice with no guarantee of permanence.

This is where the moral case for giving; that literacy is good, that children deserve books, that Parton’s legacy is worth honoring should give way to a structural case, because the moral case, while true, does nothing to explain why HBCU alumni specifically should act, or why they should act through this program rather than any other worthy cause competing for the same dollar. The structural case is that early childhood reading proficiency is the first stage of the same talent pipeline that HBCU admissions offices, endowments, and surrounding local economies depend on decades later. The Annie E. Casey Foundation has found that students who are not reading proficiently by the end of third grade are four times more likely to leave high school without a diploma than proficient readers, and shared reading in the earliest years has been identified in the pediatric research literature as one of the most effective levers for building the school-readiness skills that predict later outcomes. Every child in a majority-Black zip code who fails to reach third-grade proficiency is a young person the institutional ecosystem has effectively lost before that child ever applies anywhere; not lost to a rival university, but lost to a structural gap that formed a decade earlier and was never someone’s assigned responsibility to close. HBCUs sit inside this pipeline whether their leadership treats it that way or not. A campus’s long-run enrollment base, its local labor pool, its alumni base twenty years out, and the tax and consumer base of the surrounding Black community are not separable from the reading outcomes of five-year-olds currently living within a few miles of the quad.

Framed this way, the Imagination Library’s donation mechanics stop being incidental and start being a genuine instrument of capital retention. The donation platform allows a donor to designate a gift to a specific Local Program Partner, either by selecting one directly or by entering a zip code or postal code, which routes the contribution to the affiliate serving that address rather than into an undifferentiated national pool. An alumnus of Fisk can direct dollars into Nashville. An alumnus of Grambling State can direct dollars into Lincoln Parish. An alumnus of Alcorn State, Fort Valley State, or Cheyney can direct dollars into Lorman, Fort Valley, or the Brandywine Valley rather than into whichever state happens to have the most visible fundraising campaign that year. This matters because the HBCU ecosystem’s chronic capital-retention problem is not only about tuition dollars or philanthropic gifts leaving the ecosystem for PWIs it is also about diffuse, well-intentioned giving that never lands in the specific towns and neighborhoods that make up the extended HBCU footprint. A general donation to a national children’s literacy charity is a fine act of citizenship. A designated donation, tied to the zip code of one’s own institution and repeated as a recurring monthly gift, is an act of institutional infrastructure-building indistinguishable in kind, if not in scale, from an endowment gift or a scholarship fund. It should be treated by advancement offices the same way: as a designated giving category, marketed alongside scholarships and building funds, not left to individual alumni to discover on their own.

Before any of this can be marketed with confidence, it needs verification, because the network’s coverage is uneven by design. Not every zip code has an active Local Program Partner (check with Imagination Library), and a well-intentioned designated gift to an HBCU’s host community will simply fail to route if no affiliate exists there yet. Alumni associations and institutional advancement offices should check availability for their specific campus community before building a giving campaign around it, and where no local affiliate exists, the more consequential action may be organizing one; approaching a local library system, community foundation, or the institution itself about becoming a Local Program Partner, which would let the university’s home community capture matching state or philanthropic dollars rather than simply mailing checks into someone else’s affiliate. That is a heavier lift than a donation button, but it is the difference between renting a spot in someone else’s infrastructure and building a permanent piece of one’s own, a distinction the HBCU ecosystem has learned to care about in banking, in real estate, and in research capacity, and should extend to children’s literacy as well.

There is a natural, if imperfect, partner already sitting inside the ecosystem for this work: the HBCU Library Alliance, a membership consortium of HBCU academic libraries built around preserving Black historical and cultural collections, developing library leadership, and building digital archives, with active Mellon Foundation support for financial capacity-building and NEH backing for humanities collections work. Its formal mandate is academic library infrastructure, not early-childhood book distribution, and this publication has been consistently corrected on the danger of assigning capabilities to institutions that do not actually have them so it would be inaccurate to describe the Alliance as an operator of childhood literacy programs or a grantor with authority over Imagination Library funding decisions. What it plausibly can do, sitting where it does inside the ecosystem, is convene. Its member libraries are physically embedded in or near the same host communities alumni would be donating into, and a consortium built around expanding access to books and preserving Black intellectual life is a natural venue for publicizing zip-code-designated giving campaigns to alumni networks, tracking which member institutions’ communities have active local affiliates and which have coverage gaps, and lending its existing credibility with member library directors to conversations with local governments and foundations about establishing new affiliates in underserved HBCU towns. None of that requires new statutory authority or grant capacity the Alliance does not have. It requires treating the organization as what it already is: a coordination point for the library infrastructure of the HBCU ecosystem, extended one step further to include the earliest readers who will eventually walk into those same libraries as students.

The broader pattern here is not new, even if the specific instance is. Public commitments to reading infrastructure in under-resourced and disproportionately Black communities have proven, across states and across administrations, to be among the more fragile line items in a state budget — vulnerable to a single legislative session in a way that private, community-anchored infrastructure is not. Books and reading are not merely contested terrain nationally; they are an active battlefield, fought out in school and library book removals, in funding fights over public library systems, and now in the quiet defunding of a program that puts a single free book in a child’s hands each month. The casualties of that fight are not abstract. A child who does not encounter books in the first five years of life does not get those years reissued at eight or twelve; the window for building early reading skill closes on a biological, not a legislative, schedule, and every budget cycle that treats early literacy funding as negotiable is making that closure permanent for some number of real children, disproportionately in the communities already carrying the least institutional cushion to absorb it. The lesson the HBCU ecosystem has already learned from its own experience with federal and state funding volatility that institutions dependent entirely on public appropriation are institutions one legislative session away from crisis applies with equal force here. The strategic response is the same in both cases: build parallel, community-owned capacity that does not evaporate when a state’s budget priorities shift.

None of this requires alumni to feel sentimental to justify participating, even if the sentiment is real and, in this case, well earned. It requires recognizing that a five-year-old in Lorman, Daytona Beach, or Dover who receives a free book every month for five years is a more literate ten-year-old, a more prepared seventeen-year-old, and, a decade or two on, a more plausible applicant, employee, or neighbor of the institution down the road and that the zip code field on a donation form is, in this narrow but real sense, an instrument of institutional strategy. The Imagination Library will likely survive the loss of its founder; whether the specific communities that surround Black colleges and universities keep receiving it is a separate question, one that now depends on whether the institutions with the clearest long-run interest in the answer choose to treat it as their responsibility.

There is also a simpler way to say all of this. Dolly Parton spent four decades showing up for Black America without asking anything of it in return and not always loudly, rarely as spectacle, usually in the form of money quietly redirected toward a Black neighborhood, a vaccine trial, an artist reworking her song, a stance taken when it would have been easier not to. The obligation that creates is not sentimental; it is the same obligation that governs any relationship built on reciprocity rather than charity. An institution she built and unsentimentally invested in is now vulnerable and not only in Indiana and Missouri, but as one casualty inside a far broader, ongoing national contest over whether children retain unencumbered access to books at all, playing out simultaneously in book removals from school and library shelves and in funding fights over public library systems nationwide. She never framed that fight as her own. But a free book mailed to a five-year-old every month for five years was always, structurally, a stake in it. Showing up for that institution the way she showed up for Black America; consistently, structurally, without waiting to be asked twice is simply the other half of the exchange she started. That is what protecting her legacy actually looks like: not a tribute, but a continuation.

How to do this, starting today:

  1. Get your HBCU’s zip code. Not your alma mater’s mailing address — the zip code of the actual community around the campus, where the children you’d be reaching live.
  2. Confirm a Local Program Partner is active there. Go to imaginationlibrary.com/check-availability and enter the zip code before donating. Coverage isn’t universal — some HBCU communities don’t have an affiliate yet, which is its own problem worth knowing about.
  3. Go to donate.imaginationlibrary.com and designate your gift. Select your country, check the box to designate the donation to a specific Local Program Partner, and enter the zip code so it routes to that community rather than into the general fund.
  4. Set it to recur monthly, not once. A one-time gift helps a handful of children for a few months. A standing monthly gift is what keeps a child enrolled from birth through age five — pick an amount you can sustain, not one that feels good today and stops in March.
  5. Pull someone else in before you close the tab. Text the group chat, post it to your chapter’s page, bring the zip code to next year’s homecoming. This works at scale only if it becomes a habit alumni pass to each other, not an individual good deed.
  6. If there’s no local partner yet, say so out loud. Flag it to your alumni association or your institution’s advancement office. A missing affiliate in an HBCU’s own community is a gap someone with standing needs to raise with a local library system or community foundation — not just wait out.

Disclaimer: This article was assisted by ClaudeAI.

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Raising Builders, Not Just Dreamers: Why African American Parenting Needs a New Blueprint Rooted in Institutional Power

Posted on August 25, 2026 by | Leave a comment

“If you raise your children to be happy, they may or may not be productive. But if you raise them to be productive, happiness tends to follow. Not the fleeting kind, but the self-earned kind.” — William A. Foster, IV

In 1867, a formerly enslaved family in the Alabama Black Belt pooled its first wages into a single ledger kept by the eldest daughter, who could read. Every dollar earned by every member of the household was recorded, and every dollar spent required a reason written beside it. Within a decade, that ledger had financed forty acres, a one-room schoolhouse, and tuition for two children at a normal school two counties over. The family did not think of itself as remarkable. It thought of itself as an operation. That distinction between a family that raises individuals and a family that runs an institution is the one African America has largely lost, and it is the one this generation of parents must recover.

The debate over how to raise Black children has, in recent years, narrowed into a contest between two imported frameworks. One is gentle parenting, an approach built around emotional attunement, negotiated boundaries, and the primacy of the child’s internal experience. The other is the disciplined, achievement-maximizing model popularized under the label “tiger parenting,” associated with East Asian immigrant households and organized around the assumption that excellence must be engineered, not discovered. Both frameworks have something to offer. Neither was built for the problem African America actually has, which is not a deficit of individual achievement but a deficit of institutional ownership and neither, notably, asks what a child owes to anything larger than a household.

This is a structural distinction, not a rhetorical one. African American households have, over the past sixty years, produced physicians, engineers, federal judges, university presidents, and Fortune 500 executives at rates that would have been unimaginable to the family keeping that 1867 ledger. And yet the balance sheet of the community as a whole; its share of bank assets, its landholdings, its endowed research capacity, its control of the institutions that educate, capitalize, and govern it has not moved in proportion to that individual advancement. The gap between individual credentialing and institutional ownership is the central economic fact of postwar Black America, and it is a fact that parenting philosophy, as currently imported and debated, does nothing to address.

The reason is straightforward. Gentle parenting and tiger parenting are both, at bottom, individual-optimization frameworks. They differ on method where one prioritizes emotional regulation, the other prioritizes output but they share an assumption: that the unit of success is the child, and that the family’s job is to produce the best possible version of that child for the child’s own benefit. Neither framework asks what the child owes back to the institutions that produced them, or what the family itself is building as an ongoing concern. A household organized around either model can raise a child into a six-figure salary and a rented apartment in a city with no connection to the family’s origin, and count that as complete success. Historically, African American households did not have the luxury of treating the family as merely a launching pad for individual departure. The family was itself an institution, often the only one fully under Black control, and children were raised as its future officers, not its former residents.

What African American families need, then, is not a synthesis of two individual-optimization models but a third model organized around a different unit of analysis: the household as an institution with a balance sheet, a governance structure, and a multigenerational mandate. But the household cannot be the terminal unit in this model, and this is where most versions of “legacy-minded” parenting stop short. A family that builds its own capital and stops at its own front door has replicated, at smaller scale, the same isolation that has weakened Black institutions generally; a landholding without a bank, a bank without a university, a university without a diaspora partner. The household is the first institution in a chain, not the last one, and children raised inside it need to understand early that the chain runs outward: from family, to the Black-owned bank or credit union that holds the family’s deposits, to the HBCU or community institution that trained its members, to the broader network of African-descended institutions on the continent and across the Diaspora that this ecosystem is, whether acknowledged or not, already entangled with.

This outward extension is not sentimental. Diaspora institutions; universities, exchanges, development banks, and enterprises across what this publication designates Africa Core represent both a market and a set of potential partners that African American capital has been almost entirely absent from, even as African American households have accumulated more collective wealth than at any point in the community’s history. A family that trains its children to think only as far as the neighborhood or the HBCU that produced them is training them to operate inside a smaller institutional universe than the one actually available to them. A family that trains its children to understand Africa Core institutions as legitimate strategic partners; not as a heritage destination or a charitable cause, but as counterparties in trade, education, and finance is preparing them for a considerably larger field of institutional play. This is a matter of literacy as much as intention: a child who can explain why an African Depository Receipt structure might allow a Black-owned enterprise to list on an African exchange has a materially different frame than one who was simply told to “know their African history.”

This reframes what “cultural confidence” should mean inside the household. It is common, and not wrong, to want children to know Black history and African history. But that knowledge functions very differently depending on whether it is transmitted as heritage or as strategy. A child who knows that the Mali Empire under Mansa Musa possessed wealth on a scale historians still struggle to estimate, but does not also understand why that wealth left no durable institutional apparatus behind it, has learned a fact without learning the lesson. The lesson is that capital without institutions is temporary, however large it is at its peak — a lesson equally applicable to a family’s household wealth and to a civilization’s. Children raised with this frame do not treat diaspora history as content to be proud of; they treat it as a cautionary case study in what their own family and community are still at risk of repeating.

Several concrete practices distinguish this model from either import, and each one now needs a diaspora dimension that is usually missing. The first is treating family meetings as governance rather than logistics; regular sessions, monthly is typical among families that sustain this practice, in which children are present for real discussion of what the family owns, owes, and is building toward. Extended properly, these meetings also address where the family’s capital sits in relation to Black-owned financial institutions rather than mainstream white-owned lenders by default, and whether any portion of family investment, however small, is directed toward diaspora-linked opportunity rather than exclusively domestic and mainstream markets.

The second practice is treating a child’s education and career as a capital allocation decision made by the household, with the question reframed from “what do you want to be” to “what institution or system do you want to be capable of building or running” and that system should be understood to include Africa Core institutions as a live option, not an afterthought. A child who becomes a physician under this model might be asked not only whether the family should fund a scholarship at the HBCU that trained them, but whether a medical partnership or exchange with an African Core institution is within reach. Fisk, Xavier of Louisiana, Meharry, and Morehouse School of Medicine have each supplied physicians into families that made exactly this domestic calculation; very few have extended the same calculation across the Atlantic, and that is the gap this model asks families to close.

The third practice is structuring rites of passage around economic contribution rather than consumption pairing major life transitions with a corresponding step in managing capital, drafting a business plan, or taking a formal role in family enterprise. Norfolk State, Bethune-Cookman, and Alcorn State each sit inside regional economies where family enterprise remains viable, and families near those institutions have more opportunity than most to make this practice concrete.

The fourth practice is explicit instruction in the mechanics of collective capital; family investment clubs, the dangers of heirs’ property and forced partition, the function of a family trust or LLC in holding assets across generations without fragmentation. This is not financial literacy as a slogan; it is mechanism-specific instruction, and the same instruction should extend to the mechanics of diaspora capital circulation, so that a child understands not only how to protect family land in the Mississippi Delta but how African American enterprise might eventually list, trade, or partner across Africa Core markets.

None of this requires treating children purely as instruments, and a household that does so will produce resentment and eventual defection, which defeats the purpose. Emotional security and individual flourishing remain conditions for sustained institutional contribution, not competitors with it. The correction is one of scope as much as sequencing: the mandate a household transmits should not terminate at the family’s own advancement, or even at the advancement of the nearest HBCU or Black bank, but should understand itself as one node in a coordinated ecosystem that includes the full institutional Diaspora.

The comparison that clarifies the stakes is between two children who end up in different relationships to that ecosystem. One child is trained from an individual-optimization frame, secures a strong salary, and directs the returns on that investment toward personal consumption and geographic departure. A second child, raised inside a household organized institutionally and taught to see the Diaspora as a coordinated system rather than a collection of disconnected causes, may follow a similar career path but returns capacity to family, to community institutions, and where the opportunity exists to Africa Core partners as well. Both may report comparable personal satisfaction. Only one outcome adds to the institutional density of African America and the wider Diaspora it is part of.

This is the argument for institutional parenting, and it should be understood as strategic rather than moral: households that stop at their own advancement, or even at their own neighborhood’s advancement, are not failing their children, but they are failing to build the multi-tiered asset base — familial, communal, and diasporic — that the ecosystem as a whole requires to close its institutional-ownership gap. That gap will not close through individual achievement, however impressive it continues to be, and it will not close through household wealth-building that stops at the water’s edge. It closes only when families begin raising children who understand themselves as heirs not just to a household, but to an entire, interconnected institutional Diaspora they are responsible for strengthening.

Editor’s Note: To make this concrete rather than conceptual; a family investment club that currently allocates purely to domestic equities or a home-purchase fund could, without restructuring, designate a small, fixed percentage of new contributions (a family might set this at five or ten percent, reviewed annually rather than left open-ended) to a “Diaspora allocation” line, tracked separately in the club’s ledger the same way a 1867 household ledger tracked land money apart from schooling money. That line does not require access to instruments that do not yet exist. It can fund things available now: a stake in an African American-owned enterprise already doing business in an Africa Core market, a deposit or investment product offered by one of the African American-owned banks or credit unions active in diaspora trade finance, attendance at an Africa Core trade or investment conference where a family member makes direct contact with counterparts on the continent, or a subscription that keeps the family current on African exchange and policy developments rather than reliant on secondhand summary. The point of naming the line item now, while children are still watching the ledger, is not to bet on a future instrument. It is to build the habit of treating the Diaspora as a place the family’s capital already goes, in small and specific ways, so that when larger mechanisms for cross-listing and cross-investment do mature, the household has years of practice allocating toward that horizon rather than a decision to make from a standing start.

Disclaimer: This article was assisted by ClaudeAI.

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For Keeps: Why HBCUs Should Offer Marriage Classes To Help Strengthen African American Marriages

Posted on August 18, 2026 by | Leave a comment

“Marriage is not just about two people. It is about generations. It is about legacy. It is about survival.” – Dr. Claudine Gay, former Harvard President

In a village that depended on a single hearth for warmth, the keeping of the fire was once a taught craft passed from elder to apprentice, tended with discipline, understood as the difference between a community that endured winter and one that scattered. Over generations, the village built schools for hunting, schools for building, schools for trade. But no one built a school for the fire. Slowly, fewer hands knew how to keep it lit. Neighbors blamed the wind, the wet wood, the weather. Few asked why the village had stopped teaching the one skill that kept every other institution warm enough to function. The fire did not go out because the people stopped valuing it. It went out because no institution took responsibility for keeping the knowledge alive.

African American marriage is that fire, and the data on its decline describes an institutional failure rather than a cultural one. According to Census Bureau figures, roughly 30 percent of African American adults were married as of the most recent American Community Survey data, compared with 48 percent of the general population, a gap that has widened steadily since the 1960s, when Black marriage rates were comparable to or higher than the national average. This is not a story about African Americans falling out of love with the institution of marriage. It is a story about an institution — Black marriage — losing the infrastructure that once supported it, without any comparable institution stepping in to replace that support.

The consequences extend well beyond the household. Marriage has historically functioned as one of the more reliable engines of capital retention available to any community: pooled income, shared debt reduction, dual-earner asset accumulation, and consolidated intergenerational transfer. Brookings Institution research has repeatedly found that married-couple households experience substantially lower poverty rates than single-parent households, and that children raised in stable two-parent homes show measurably better outcomes in educational attainment and economic mobility. For a community already contending with a fractional share of national wealth relative to population, the erosion of marriage as a mainstream institution is not incidental to the wealth gap — it is one of its active mechanisms. Every dissolved partnership typically means divided assets, duplicated housing costs, and a disrupted trajectory toward the kind of multigenerational capital formation that built family land holdings, small businesses, and college funds in prior generations.

The historical record makes clear that this was not always the pattern. W.E.B. Du Bois, in his early sociological studies of Black family life, documented how enslavement had deliberately disrupted African American marriage and kinship structures, and how formerly enslaved people responded to emancipation in part by rushing to formalize marriages that slavery had denied them any legal standing to protect. The Reconstruction-era freedpeople who built schools, mutual aid societies, and land cooperatives were frequently organized around married households functioning as economic units; the marital pair was, in a very literal sense, load-bearing infrastructure for Black institution-building in that era. What has since eroded is not the aspiration toward that model but the institutional scaffolding that made it achievable: stable employment, intact communities, and critically any structured space where the skills of sustaining a marriage were taught with the same seriousness as a trade.

This is precisely the vacuum HBCUs are positioned to fill, and the case for doing so does not require sentimental appeals to romance or nostalgia. It requires only that HBCUs apply the same institutional logic to family formation that they already apply to workforce development. An HBCU curriculum trains accountants, engineers, and physicians because the community needs functioning professionals; the same community needs functioning households, and no other institution in the African American ecosystem (not churches, not employers, not government agencies) is as well positioned to deliver rigorous, scaled, cross-disciplinary instruction on the mechanics of sustaining a marriage. Fisk University’s long tradition in sociology, Tougaloo College’s history of community-facing scholarship, and Grambling State’s applied family and consumer sciences programs all suggest existing academic infrastructure that could be redirected toward this purpose without requiring new departments built from scratch.

A serious marriage curriculum at an HBCU would resemble a professional program more than a personal-development seminar. It would draw faculty from economics departments to teach household financial planning and joint asset management; from psychology and counseling programs to address conflict resolution and intergenerational trauma; from history departments to contextualize how slavery, segregation, and mass incarceration shaped contemporary Black relationship patterns; and from business schools to examine how marital partnership functions as a structural input into family enterprise, drawing on the same case-study method used to teach corporate strategy. Institutions like Delaware State University and Norfolk State University, both of which maintain applied social science and business programs, could pilot such coursework without significant new capital investment. Coppin State and Savannah State, serving urban populations directly affected by the economic pressures driving marriage decline, would be logical sites for community-facing certificate offerings rather than undergraduate electives alone.

That continuing-education dimension matters as much as the classroom version. HBCUs already operate certificate programs in fields like nonprofit management and workforce development; a Certificate in Household Formation and Family Economics, offered through evening or weekend cohorts, could extend access to alumni, local community members, and couples well past traditional college age. Institutions such as Alcorn State and Fort Valley State, both deeply embedded in the agricultural economies of their regions, could frame this instruction around the long Black Southern tradition of the marital household as an economic production unit — a farm run by a married couple, a family business built jointly — rather than importing a therapeutic model disconnected from economic reality. Xavier University of Louisiana and Dillard University, both with strong pre-professional pipelines, could position the coursework alongside career preparation, treating relationship stability as a professional competency rather than a private matter.

None of this should be mistaken for a claim that curriculum alone resolves a decline rooted in economic insecurity, mass incarceration, and structural exclusion from stable employment. Those forces are real, and no fifteen-week course reverses them. But HBCUs have never waited for surrounding conditions to be favorable before building institutions; the founding of Black colleges in the aftermath of emancipation happened precisely because no one else was going to build the educational infrastructure African Americans needed, regardless of how hostile the broader environment was. Treating marriage education as a fringe offering, best left to churches or private counseling, concedes an institutional responsibility that HBCUs are better resourced to carry at scale. Cheyney University and Lincoln University, as the nation’s oldest HBCUs, carry a particular symbolic weight in reclaiming this ground, institutions whose founding generation understood family stability as inseparable from the broader project of Black institutional survival.

The strategic case is ultimately about capital retention and institutional density, the same throughlines that govern every other domain of HBCU strategy. A stable married household retains capital inside the family rather than losing it to divided assets and duplicated costs. It concentrates two incomes, two networks, and two sets of institutional relationships rather than diffusing them. And it strengthens the density of Black institutional life by producing the next generation of donors, alumni, and community stakeholders from intact family units with the resources to sustain that engagement. HBCUs already understand that they are training more than individual professionals, they are building the institutional backbone of a community. Treating marriage as infrastructure worth teaching, rather than a private matter outside the university’s mandate, is a natural extension of that mission, not a departure from it.

Disclaimer: This article was assisted by ClaudeAI.

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The 1.8% Problem: What the Wealth Data Says About NIL’s HBCU Gap

Posted on August 11, 2026 by | Leave a comment

“In a race-based capitalist society, it’s not what you know — it’s what you own.” – Dr. Claud Anderson

In 1975, a small manufacturing town watched its largest employer announce a new headquarters two counties over. The mayor called a meeting of the leading families and asked them to match the incentive package the rival town had offered. The families were respected, well-connected, active in every civic club in the region but not one of them owned the mill, the bank, or the rail line that had made the town matter in the first place. They owned homes, pensions, and good names. The headquarters left. Two decades later, when a regional grocery distributor scouted the same corridor for a new warehouse hub, it wasn’t the town’s civic reputation that won the deal, it was the fact that, by then, three local families owned the land, the trucking contracts, and the cold-storage facility the distributor needed to move product. Ownership, not affection, decided where capital went.

That distinction between people who care about an institution and people who own enough to move capital toward it is the one that has been missing from nearly every conversation about Name, Image and Likeness and the widening chasm between Historically Black Colleges and Universities and their Power Four counterparts. The prevailing HBCU theory of the NIL era held that Black America’s demonstrable, generational devotion to its football and basketball programs would translate into competitive collective fundraising once the NCAA’s amateurism rules fell. It has not, and it will not, because the premise was never about devotion. It was about ownership, and on that metric the arithmetic was never close.

Consider what happened in West Texas this summer. Texas Tech’s football stadium, known for decades as Jones AT&T Stadium, was renamed Galaxy Stadium in a naming-rights agreement reported at $75 million, replacing AT&T as the venue’s corporate partner. Galaxy Digital is a cryptocurrency and AI-infrastructure company that operates a large data campus in nearby Dickens County, currently undergoing a multibillion-dollar expansion. Its founder and chief executive, Mike Novogratz, is a Princeton graduate. AT&T, the company that held the naming rights before it, is led by John Stankey, a graduate of Loyola Marymount and UCLA. Neither man has any alumni tie to Texas Tech. The deal was not an act of institutional loyalty. It was a commercial transaction, a company with regional infrastructure interests buying brand proximity to a media asset with roughly 60,000 seats and a television footprint. Around the same time, Ripple became the first cryptocurrency sponsor to appear on a college jersey, at the University of Kansas, the alma mater of Ripple’s chief executive, Brad Garlinghouse, but a decision made unilaterally by a founder who controls his company’s marketing budget, not a fundraising campaign that mobilized thousands of small donors.

Compare that to the version of “alumni giving” available to HBCUs. Mark Cuban, a 1981 graduate of Indiana University and among the wealthiest men to build his fortune from a single company he founded and sold, has been a steady donor to his alma mater: roughly five million dollars for a sports media center in 2015, six million for the rugby program, and an undisclosed “big number” more recently funneled toward Indiana’s transfer portal recruiting. These are genuinely generous gifts from a genuinely engaged alumnus. They are also, by an order of magnitude or more, smaller than what a single infrastructure company paid for a stadium’s name. That gap is the entire story. When the money comes from an alumnus who happens to own a company outright, the number is real but bounded by one person’s balance sheet. When the money comes from a corporation with no alumni relationship at all, the number reflects what an asset, the media rights, the stadium, the media market, is worth on the open market, and it dwarfs even the most generous individual gift.

HBCUs have access to neither lever at scale, and the reason is visible in the numbers rather than in sentiment. HBCU Money’s 2024 Annual Wealth Report, drawing on Federal Reserve data, put total African American household assets at roughly $7.1 trillion. Private businesses — the asset class that actually produces boosters capable of writing nine-figure checks — accounted for just $330 billion of that, or 4.7% of African American household assets, and only 1.8% of all U.S. household private business assets. For a population that is roughly 13 to 14% of the country, a 1.8% share of the nation’s private business wealth is not a gap; it is close to an absence, and it is the single most underrepresented major asset category in the entire report relative to population share. Corporate equities and mutual fund shares told the same story from a different angle: also $330 billion, also 4.7% of Black household assets, but a mere 0.7% of total U.S. household equity holdings meaning African American households are not meaningfully participating in the ownership side of public markets either.

What African American households do hold, in scale, is retirement income tied to employment. Defined benefit pension entitlements totaled $1.73 trillion or 24.4% of all African American household assets, and 9.7% of the nation’s defined benefit pension assets, by far the highest representation of any asset category relative to population share. Add defined contribution plans like 401(k)s, another $880 billion and 12.4% of assets, and pension entitlements alone account for nearly 37% of everything African American households own — more than real estate, more than every other asset class combined except real estate itself. That is not a portfolio built by owners. It is a balance sheet built by workers: people whose wealth exists because an employer, public or private, guaranteed them a retirement benefit in exchange for decades of labor, not because they held equity in the enterprise itself. The wealth is real, and the institutions that produced it, often public-sector employers and unionized industries, deserve credit for building it. But a pension check, however large in aggregate, cannot write a stadium naming-rights deal. Only ownership can, and ownership is precisely the asset class where the data shows African American households are furthest from parity.

This is not a story about HBCU alumni failing to show up. It is a story about a capital-formation deficit that predates NIL by a century, rooted in exclusion from mainstream lending, redlining that kept Black-owned enterprise from accumulating the commercial real estate and equity positions that compound into founder-scale wealth, and a labor-market history that concentrated African American economic participation in employment rather than ownership, a history the wealth data confirms is still very much the present, not just the past. NIL simply exposed, in real time and in dollar figures anyone can look up, a gap that institutional strategists have been describing in more abstract terms for years. The mistake was believing that emotional intensity, the unmatched loyalty HBCU alumni show their bands, their homecomings, their institutions could substitute for what only ownership scale provides. It cannot. A hundred thousand donors giving fifty dollars each produces five million dollars and an enormous amount of goodwill. It does not produce seventy-five million dollars, because the mathematics of collective small-dollar giving and the mathematics of a single balance sheet decision operate on entirely different curves.

The strategic response, then, cannot be a better fundraising pitch. It has to be a redirection of where HBCU athletic and institutional leadership spend their effort. Conference-level collective bargaining, SWAC and MEAC schools pooling media rights and NIL infrastructure rather than competing individually for the same small donor base, captures at least some of the scale economics that individual HBCUs cannot achieve alone. Building actual venture and private equity vehicles modeled on efforts like Ariel Investments’ Project Black, which exists explicitly to grow Black-owned enterprises to the scale where their founders become the next generation of nine-figure donors, addresses the underlying ownership gap rather than the symptom. HBCU athletic departments should pursue infrastructure and commercial partnerships on the same terms Galaxy Digital pursued Texas Tech; as deals tied to real assets (media rights, campus real estate, facility co-location) rather than appeals to conscience from companies with no alumni connection to lose sleep over. And alumni giving programs should shift from one-time gifts toward equity-bearing vehicles — alumni investment funds tied to HBCU-linked enterprises — that convert working-professional generosity into compounding ownership stakes rather than annual write-offs.

None of this closes the gap by next season. The wealth data suggests the honest horizon for building an HBCU-linked ownership class capable of matching this kind of capital is measured in decades, not fundraising cycles, the private business share of African American wealth has moved only marginally year over year even as pensions and real estate continued compounding. But the alternative of continuing to ask a donor base of working professionals to out-fundraise infrastructure companies and telecom giants was never a strategy. It was a hope mistaken for one.

Disclaimer: This article was assisted by ClaudeAI.

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