Tag Archives: Black institutional power

The Counter-Curriculum: How HBCUs Must Respond to a Global Infrastructure of Violence Against (Black) Women

Posted on April 26, 2026 by | Leave a comment

The most disrespected person in America is the Black woman. The most unprotected person in America is the Black woman. The most neglected person in America is the Black woman. — Malcolm X, 1962

Malcolm X’s oft-quoted declaration that the Black woman is “the most disrespected, unprotected, and neglected person in America” was delivered in 1962. More than six decades later, the data have not refuted him. A CNN investigation published in late March 2026 has exposed something that demands a serious, institutional response from every sector of Black America, including and especially its colleges and universities. A months-long investigation uncovered a hidden, online world where the commodification and amplification of sexual violence against women is flourishing, a network of men sharing techniques for drugging their partners, filming the assaults, trading the videos, and livestreaming them to paying audiences. The site at the center of the investigation, Motherless.com, had 62 million visits in February 2026 alone, with its core audience based in the United States, and hosts more than 20,000 videos of so-called “sleep” content footage of women filmed without their knowledge while unconscious. To place that figure in context: 62 million people would constitute the 25th largest country in the world — larger than South Korea, Algeria, and Canada. That is the monthly audience for a single platform built around the sexual violation of unconscious women. It is not a subculture. It is a global institution of predation, and it is operating primarily out of the United States.

Gender violence is not a single act. It is a spectrum of harm rooted in the unequal distribution of power between men and women that manifests across every stage of life and every social environment. It includes rape and sexual assault, intimate partner violence, domestic abuse, and femicide. It includes sexual harassment in workplaces, schools, and public spaces. It includes child sexual abuse, the grooming of minors, and child marriage — the practice of forcing girls into unions before they are legally or developmentally capable of consent, which remains prevalent across parts of Africa, the Caribbean, and South Asia, and which is not absent from communities within the United States. It includes stalking, coercive control, and psychological abuse that leaves no visible wound but dismantles a person’s autonomy over time. It includes digital abuse — the non-consensual sharing of intimate images, online harassment campaigns, and, as the CNN investigation has now documented in clinical detail, the organized online distribution of assault footage as a commodity. Gender violence is, in the fullest sense, a system: one that is reproduced through culture, enabled by institutions that fail to act, and sustained by the silence of those who witness it and say nothing. Understanding it as a system, rather than as a series of isolated incidents perpetrated by exceptional individuals, is the prerequisite for any institutional response that will actually reduce it.

This is not a peripheral issue. It is not a culture war distraction. It is a public health emergency and a civilizational challenge, and the African American institutional ecosystem, which has historically risen to meet civilizational challenges, cannot treat it as someone else’s problem.It is a problem acutely within our community as well.

The scale of what CNN uncovered speaks to a level of organized predation that defies casual dismissal. Inside the Telegram group documented by CNN, men from Poland, West Africa, Spain, and across the world shared specific drugs and doses for sedating their partners, traded assault videos for feedback, and livestreamed the abuse of unconscious women in real time for $20 a viewer, with cryptocurrency as the preferred payment method. A French lawmaker who was herself drugged by a former senator described these groups as “an online rape academy, where every subject is taught.” Perpetrators are also systematically engineering their conduct around evidentiary challenges shifting toward zolpidem, or Ambien, specifically because it exits the body in seven to eight hours, meaning that by the time a survivor wakes up, registers that something may have happened, and reaches a hospital, the toxicological window may already have closed.

The forensic sophistication of this network, the deliberate drug selection, the cryptocurrency payments, the global coordination points to something beyond impulsive misconduct. It reflects a learned culture of predation, one that is being transmitted across generations of men through digital infrastructure. That transmission infrastructure is now operating at scale, and it is finding ready audiences in the United States.

For Black America, the alarm must ring louder still, because the baseline conditions that produce vulnerability to gender violence are already catastrophically elevated within the community.

The statistics are not ambiguous. More than four in ten Black women experience physical violence from an intimate partner during their lifetimes — a rate higher than white women, Latinas, and Asian and Pacific Islander women. More than 20 percent of Black women are raped during their lifetimes, a higher share than among women overall. Black women face a particularly high risk of being killed at the hands of a man, and one study found they were two and a half times more likely to be murdered by men than their white counterparts, with more than nine in ten Black female victims knowing their killers. More recent data sharpens the picture further: Black adult women are six times more likely to be killed than white women, and an estimated 51 percent of Black female adult homicides are related to intimate partner violence.

The problem is not confined to adulthood. One in four Black girls will be sexually abused before the age of 18, and 40 to 60 percent of Black women report being subjected to coercive sexual contact by age 18. For every Black woman who reports rape, at least 15 do not. Nearly 92 percent of Black women homicide victims knew their killers, and 56 percent of those killings were committed by a current or former intimate partner with 92 percent of those cases being intraracial.

What Black America is experiencing is not an anomaly. It is the domestic expression of a global pattern that follows Black and African-descended women across every geography in which they live. In the Caribbean, recent studies conducted in Grenada, Guyana, Jamaica, Suriname, and Trinidad and Tobago indicate that 27 to 40 percent of women have experienced violence at the hands of their partners. Jamaica holds the second-highest rate of femicide in the world, and in Guyana, 55 percent of women reported having experienced at least one form of violence, including intimate partner violence and non-partner sexual abuse. In the United Kingdom, Black and Black British women experience gender-based violence including domestic violence at higher rates than other minority ethnic groups. On the African continent, South Africa’s Human Sciences Research Council found higher victimization rates specifically among Black African women, and in a single quarter of 2024 alone, 957 women were murdered, with more than 10,000 rapes reported. In direct response to this continental emergency, the African Union adopted its first dedicated legal instrument aimed at ending all forms of violence against women and girls in February 2025, a convention that specifically promotes positive masculinity and greater accountability as a unique feature of its framework.

The global dimension is not incidental to the American story. It is the same story told across different jurisdictions. The same cultural scripts that normalize male dominance and erode accountability for violence against women operate in Kingston and Cape Town and London and Detroit. The same digital networks that the CNN investigation exposed are recruiting perpetrators from West Africa, Europe, and the United States simultaneously. This is a Diaspora crisis, and it demands a Diaspora response. HBCUs, which have increasingly built academic and institutional relationships with African and Caribbean universities, are positioned to connect these dots to situate the American crisis within its global context, to learn from interventions that are working elsewhere, and to contribute research and programming models to a broader African diaspora conversation about the protection of Black women. The African Union’s masculinity framework, the Caribbean’s regional data infrastructure, and the HBCU ecosystem’s cultural reach into Black American communities are assets that, taken together, could form the foundation of a genuinely transnational response. That potential will remain unrealized as long as American Black institutions treat gender violence as a domestic social services problem rather than what it actually is: a global threat to Black women that requires the same level of coordinated diaspora strategy that these institutions bring to economic development and political advocacy.

These numbers do not describe a community that is adequately protecting its women. They describe a structural failure that has accumulated over generations, one that requires structural remedies not simply moral condemnation, and not simply resources directed at survivors after the fact. The problem must be addressed at the point of formation: in boys, in young men, in the cultural scripts that normalize domination and erode accountability.

This is where HBCUs and the broader African American institutional ecosystem must act with far greater seriousness and coordination than they have to date.

The HBCU sector occupies a unique position in this conversation. These institutions enroll a substantial share of Black college students, graduate a disproportionate share of Black professionals, and carry a legacy of moral leadership during periods of civilizational crisis. They are also, frankly, not immune from the problem. Gender violence and retaliation are common in higher education, and Black campuses are not insulated from this reality. Students at HBCUs confront gender injustices that particularly affect the lives of women and gender nonconforming persons, and HBCUs, by primarily centering institutional focus on the enrollment challenges of Black men, can inadvertently support a belief that Black women and LGBTQIA+ students face fewer obstacles, an assumption that does not survive contact with the data.

There is existing infrastructure to build on. Research has examined culturally specific domestic violence prevention programs for HBCU campuses, finding that cultural barriers and preconceived stigmas reduce the effectiveness of standard prevention programs meaning that interventions designed for predominantly white institutions cannot simply be transplanted into HBCU contexts. In 2024, the Department of Justice’s Office on Violence Against Women awarded 19 grants totaling $9.48 million through a special initiative supporting HBCUs, Hispanic-Serving Institutions, and Tribal Colleges and Universities to strengthen campus responses to domestic violence, dating violence, sexual assault, and stalking. These grants represent a foundation. They do not represent a comprehensive response and they should not be the primary funding mechanism. The private sector has both the resources and the standing to act with far greater scale and far less bureaucratic latency than federal grant cycles allow. One hundred African American millionaires committing $500,000 per campus over two years would deliver $500,000 in dedicated programming support to every HBCU, a total investment of $50 million that would instantly dwarf existing federal allocations, establish donor-driven accountability structures, and signal to the entire sector that this is a philanthropic priority, not merely a compliance obligation. That capital commitment is not aspirational arithmetic. It is a straightforward mobilization of the wealth that already exists within the African American professional and entrepreneurial class, directed toward an institutional crisis that wealth alone cannot solve but that no institutional solution can be built without.

What is needed is something more ambitious in scope and more durable in design. The CNN investigation is a data point about what is already circulating through digital culture, the attitudes, the techniques, the normalization of violation, before young men arrive on any campus. The university is downstream of the problem, and while campus programming is necessary, it is insufficient on its own. The pipeline of harm begins in early childhood, and the intervention architecture must match. This requires HBCUs and their affiliated institutional ecosystems to coordinate across three tiers.

The first is early childhood and K-12 engagement. Organizations like 100 Black Men of America, which operates mentorship programs in cities across the country and works directly with boys from middle school age through young adulthood, are positioned to embed gender respect curricula into the environments where boys develop their foundational understanding of power and relationship. This is not sensitivity training; it is character formation infrastructure. The organization’s existing mentorship architecture structured, sustained, male-to-male, and explicitly oriented toward community development is precisely the vehicle through which collective accountability norms can be transmitted before boys reach campus. Urban League affiliates and Jack and Jill of America, which maintains strong networks among Black middle-class families with children, offer complementary reach into different socioeconomic strata. None of this formation work operates in a vacuum, however. It must be reinforced by sustained, visible messaging through the media infrastructure that Black families actually consume. Black-owned media outlets (television networks, radio stations, digital platforms, and podcasts with significant Black audiences) carry an institutional responsibility to make gender violence a recurring subject of public discourse rather than an episodic response to national headlines. PSA campaigns developed in partnership with HBCU communications and media programs, featuring Black men speaking directly and without deflection about the protection of Black women and girls, would represent a meaningful use of that infrastructure. The message cannot come only from institutions; it must circulate through culture, and Black-owned media is the vehicle for that circulation.

The second tier is the HBCU campus itself, which must move beyond compliance frameworks toward genuine culture change. Research has found that many Black males use toxic masculinity as a crutch to conceal insecurity and hardship, and that Black men with higher levels of anxiety and aggressive confrontational styles are more likely to endorse intimate partner violence beliefs while Black men who identify more with collectivist values are less likely to do so. This finding has direct programmatic implications: interventions that strengthen identification with community, mutual obligation, and the protection of the group are more effective than those that approach the problem primarily through legal deterrence or shame. HBCUs should develop standing male accountability cohorts not one-time training sessions, but sustained, semester-long formations that engage students in the intellectual, historical, and practical dimensions of gender justice within Black institutional life. Faculty development is equally critical and equally neglected. The HBCU Faculty Development Network, a national organization that supports effective teaching and professional growth across HBCUs and minority-serving institutions, represents a ready infrastructure through which gender violence prevention training can be integrated into faculty and administrator development at scale. Professors, academic advisors, and student affairs staff are among the earliest points of contact when students in crisis reach out or when warning signs emerge; they require preparation that goes well beyond Title IX compliance checklists, and the Faculty Development Network has the convening capacity to deliver it. The campus is also a high-density media environment with captive audiences at predictable moments, and HBCU athletic events represent one of the most underutilized platforms in Black institutional life for norm-setting messaging. HBCU football and basketball games draw tens of thousands of attendees (students, alumni, families, and community members) and are increasingly broadcast to national audiences. PSA spots aired during these events, developed with the same production seriousness as any institutional branding campaign and featuring Black men calling other Black men to explicit accountability, would reach a cross-generational audience in a context that carries genuine cultural weight. Homecoming weekends alone represent a communication opportunity that no digital campaign can replicate. The question is whether HBCU athletic conferences and their media partners treat this as part of their institutional mandate or continue to leave halftime to entertainment alone.

The third tier is the broader community ecosystem, and it requires more than exhortation directed at existing organizations. What is needed is a sector-wide initiative coordinated through the institutional bodies that actually govern HBCU life: the Thurgood Marshall College Fund and the United Negro College Fund, both of which maintain direct relationships with HBCU presidents and boards and have the organizational capacity to set sector-wide standards, attract expert partners, and hold institutions accountable for measurable outcomes. A gender violence prevention framework embedded in HBCU enrollment requirements, first-year experience programming, and faculty development designed in partnership with research institutions and evidence-based practitioners, and tracked longitudinally would represent a genuine structural intervention rather than a campus-by-campus patchwork of compliance exercises. The sector has coordinated on financial aid advocacy, accreditation defense, and federal funding campaigns. It must now coordinate on the protection of Black women and girls from a global infrastructure of organized sexual predation that is actively recruiting its next generation of perpetrators through the same devices sitting in every Black student’s pocket.

Cutting across all three tiers is a research and institutional development problem that has received far too little attention. Effective intervention requires data — longitudinal, culturally specific, and grounded in the actual dynamics of Black family and community life. That research capacity exists within the HBCU ecosystem and needs to be dramatically strengthened. Hampton University’s National Center for Black Family Life, which has operated for over four decades and produces an Annual Report on the State of Black Families, represents exactly the kind of HBCU-anchored research institution that should be at the center of this work. It is neither well-funded nor well-known relative to the scale of the problem it is positioned to address. Institutions like it; research centers embedded within HBCUs, oriented toward Black family formation and community health, capable of generating the culturally specific data that generic national surveys do not produce need philanthropic investment, federal research partnerships, and coordinated visibility across the HBCU sector. The absence of robust, HBCU-generated research on gender violence within Black communities is itself a strategic gap. It leaves the field to outside institutions whose framing does not always reflect Black community realities and whose findings do not reliably reach Black institutional decision-makers. Closing that gap is not an academic exercise; it is a precondition for evidence-based programming that actually works.

It is important to be precise about what this argument is and is not making. Groups dedicated to involving men in ending violence against women have operated for decades; organizations like Men Stopping Violence in Atlanta use an ecological, community-based accountability model that demonstrates the potential for disrupting traditions of abuse and dominance at individual, familial, local, national, and global levels. The model works. The evidence supports it. What has been missing is the willingness of Black institutional leadership to adopt it at scale, fund it sustainably, talk about it publicly, and hold themselves accountable for measurable outcomes. Black men at every level of institutional life, from university presidents to student leaders to media personalities with large audiences must be willing to discuss this problem actively and without the defensive hedging that has allowed it to fester. The “not all men” reflex is a cultural tax levied on Black women every time they attempt to raise the alarm. Black men who understand what is at stake for their community have both the standing and the obligation to retire it.

The CNN investigation does not represent an aberration. It represents the visible tip of a global infrastructure of learned predation that is operating through the same digital channels that Black boys and young men inhabit daily. The WHO has noted that reliable data on drug-facilitated sexual assault is scarce by design, because the crime is severely underreported — a product of the shame, guilt, perceived self-blame, and absence of memory that make these cases particularly hard for survivors to come forward on, compounded by inadequate law enforcement training and a prosecution record that gives survivors little reason to expect the process to go well. The underreporting problem is especially severe in Black communities, where historical distrust of law enforcement creates additional barriers to disclosure.

The Black woman, as Malcolm X observed, has carried more than her share in this country. She has built institutions, sustained families, anchored communities, and produced excellence under conditions of compound marginalization. The question before Black America’s institutional leadership (university presidents, national officers of civic and professional organizations, sorority leadership, professional association executives, Black media owners, and community development directors) is whether they will mobilize the full weight of that institutional infrastructure in her defense. Not as an act of charity, but as a strategic imperative: communities that do not protect their women do not survive as communities. They fracture, they hollow out, and they lose the institutional density on which collective advancement depends.

The online academy exposed by CNN is teaching a curriculum of violation to an audience that is, in substantial part, American and potentially present in every Black community in the country. The answer must be a counter-curriculum one built from early childhood through college, amplified through Black-owned media, announced at halftime on HBCU fields and courts, connected to diaspora partners from Accra to Kingston to London, and driven by Black men who are willing to say plainly that this is their problem to solve. HBCUs are not the only institution with a role to play. But they are among the most important, and the moment demands that they act accordingly.

Organizations Working to End Gender Violence: Where to Direct Your Support

The article you have just read describes a crisis. The following organizations are doing the institutional work of responding to it. Readers who wish to support this work financially or through advocacy are encouraged to consider each of these organizations based on geography, focus area, and mission alignment.

Ujima: The National Center on Violence Against Women in the Black Community — The only national resource center in the United States dedicated exclusively to addressing domestic violence, sexual assault, and community violence within the Black community. Ujima leads training, research, policy advocacy, and technical assistance with a focus on healing Black women and girls across the African diaspora. (ujimacommunity.org)

Black Women’s Blueprint — Founded in 2008 by Black women in Brooklyn, Black Women’s Blueprint is a transnational civil and human rights organization that centers the experiences of women of African descent in the fight against sexual violence, reproductive injustice, and racial inequality. The organization convened the first Black Women’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Sexual Violence in United States history and provides technical assistance to HBCU campuses on gender violence prevention. (blackwomensblueprint.org)

A Long Walk Home — Founded in 2003 by sisters Salamishah and Scheherazade Tillet, this Chicago-based national nonprofit uses art and activism to empower Black girls and young women to end gender-based violence. Its Girl/Friends Leadership Institute trains Black girls ages 12 to 17 as social justice leaders, and the organization was a lead organizer of the #MuteRKelly campaign. (alongwalkhome.org)

The Safe Sisters Circle — Founded in 2018 by attorney Alana C. Brown, this Black woman-founded and led Washington, D.C. nonprofit provides free, culturally specific legal representation, mental health support, and advocacy to Black women and girl survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault in the city’s most underserved communities. (safesisterscircle.org)

National Black Women’s Justice Institute (NBWJI) — Founded by Dr. Monique Couvson, NBWJI works at the intersection of gender violence, race, and the criminal justice system — specifically to reduce sexual assault and domestic violence in African American communities while interrupting the school-to-confinement pipeline for Black girls. (nbwji.org)

Men Stopping Violence — An Atlanta-based organization with nearly four decades of experience using a community-based accountability model to end male violence against women. Men Stopping Violence is explicitly man-focused in its intervention design, training men and boys to disrupt the cultural norms that enable violence — making it particularly relevant to the accountability agenda outlined in this article. (menstoppingviolence.org)

Ms. Foundation for Women — One of the first funders of domestic violence shelters and sexual assault hotlines in the United States, now led by a Black woman and investing specifically in women-led movements at the intersection of race and gender violence. The Foundation funds many of the smaller, community-based Black organizations doing direct service work that national funders overlook. (ms.foundation.org)

Hampton University National Center for Black Family Life — As referenced in this article, the National Center for Black Family Life at Hampton University is the only HBCU-anchored research institution producing systematic annual data on the state of Black families in America. Philanthropic support for its research infrastructure directly strengthens the evidentiary foundation for evidence-based gender violence prevention across the sector. (ncbfl.org)

Girls for Gender Equity (GGE) — A Brooklyn-based organization founded by Joanne Smith in 2001 that works with Black and Brown girls and gender-expansive youth to dismantle the structural conditions that produce gender violence, including sexual harassment in schools and the criminalization of Black girls. GGE’s work bridges the early childhood and campus intervention tiers outlined in this article. (ggenyc.org)

If you are in immediate danger or need crisis support, contact the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233 (available 24 hours) or text START to 88788

Disclaimer: This article was assisted by ClaudeAI.

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The Color Line Was Never Broken: MLB’s Jackie Robinson Day and the Permanent Absence of Black Ownership

Posted on April 16, 2026 by | Leave a comment

Blacks are the only group of people in America who have been taught to invest their time, talents, and resources into other people’s businesses and institutions rather than their own.– Dr. Claude Anderson

Every April 15th, Major League Baseball dresses itself in the iconography of racial progress. Every player, coach, manager, and umpire in the league wears number 42, the retired number of Jackie Robinson, in a league-wide act of commemorative solidarity. Stadiums host ceremonies. The commissioner issues statements. The Negro Leagues Baseball Museum is quoted in the wire copy. This year marked the 79th anniversary of Robinson’s debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers, and the ritual was performed with its usual solemnity and precision. Bob Kendrick, president of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, offered the occasion’s defining sentiment: every player of color who now enjoys the sport owes it to this man. It was the kind of statement that lands well precisely because it is true and precisely because it forecloses the question that actually matters: what do the owners of the sport owe?

The answer, measurable across 79 years, is nothing. Because in the entire recorded history of Major League Baseball, there has never been a single African American principal owner of a franchise. Not one. The league that wraps itself annually in the image of the man who broke its color barrier has never permitted Black Americans to sit at the table where the real decisions are made and the real wealth is accumulated. Jackie Robinson Day, in this light, is not a celebration. It is a ritual performance of symbolism in the absence of substance, a ceremony that honors a labor breakthrough while quietly burying the ownership catastrophe that labor breakthrough produced.

Dr. Claude Anderson diagnosed this dynamic with clinical precision in Black Labor, White Wealth: The Search for Power and Economic Justice. Anderson’s central thesis is that African Americans have historically been incorporated into American economic structures as labor inputs essential to the production of wealth but systematically excluded from its ownership and accumulation. The pattern Anderson traces across centuries of American economic life finds one of its most vivid contemporary illustrations in professional baseball. In 1947, there were zero African American owners in Major League Baseball. In 2026, there are zero African American owners in Major League Baseball. The number has not moved in nearly eight decades of ceremonies, commemorations, and retired jerseys. Whatever integration accomplished for those who could play, it accomplished nothing for those who might own.

The financial stakes of that absence are not abstract. The average MLB franchise value entering the 2026 season is $3.17 billion, a 12 percent increase from the prior year. The New York Yankees are valued at $9 billion; the Los Angeles Dodgers at $8 billion. Thirty franchises, each a multigenerational wealth vehicle, each appreciating at rates that make even the highest player salaries look modest by comparison. The mathematics of ownership versus labor in professional sports is not complicated: franchises compound wealth over generations, while athletic careers end, often before age 35, and rarely produce the kind of capital base required to enter the ownership market. George Steinbrenner paid $10 million for the New York Yankees in 1973; the team is now valued at nearly $9 billion — a 900-fold increase. No player’s salary trajectory has ever approximated that kind of return. The wealth gap between Black athletes and the owners who profit from their labor is not a gap it is a chasm, and it has been widening for eight decades while baseball holds its annual ceremony.

What made this chasm possible was the structural transformation that Robinson’s entry into MLB initiated. Rube Foster, considered the father of Negro League Baseball, was insistent as early as 1910 that Black teams should be owned by Black men. The Negro Leagues were not merely a segregated alternative to the major leagues they were an ownership infrastructure, an economic ecosystem, a complex of jobs, investment, and community capital that functioned precisely because it was self-contained. Virtually all of the initial Negro League ownership was Black, according to Garrick Kebede, a Houston-based financial adviser and Negro League Baseball historian. When Robinson crossed the color line under Branch Rickey’s terms, he did not negotiate a merger. He negotiated a labor transfer. African American talent, the asset that had built and sustained the Negro Leagues, departed for a structure in which African Americans held no ownership stake, no board seats, no equity, and no decision-making authority. The Negro Leagues, stripped of their best labor, collapsed. The ownership infrastructure they represented was dismantled. What remained was the arrangement that has persisted ever since: Black labor generating wealth for white ownership, with the annual ceremony serving as the cultural lubricant that makes the arrangement palatable.

This publication has argued before that what African Americans celebrate when they celebrate Robinson’s debut is better understood as a miscelebration, an uncritical embrace of a “first” that, examined structurally, represented institutional dispossession rather than institutional advancement. The framework is not complicated. A community’s economic power derives not from its ability to supply labor to others’ institutions, but from its capacity to build, own, and control institutions of its own. The Negro Leagues were such an institution. Their destruction produced precisely the outcome that Dr. Anderson’s framework would predict: a permanently subordinate position within an economic structure controlled by others, with symbolic inclusion substituting for actual power.

The percentage of Black players on Opening Day rosters increased from 6.0 percent in 2024 to 6.2 percent in 2025 to 6.8 percent in 2026 — the first back-to-back annual increases in at least two decades. MLB has invested in developmental programs aimed at reversing the long decline of Black players in the sport, and the league has used this uptick as evidence of progress on Jackie Robinson Day. The framing is instructive in its evasions. At the apex of Black participation in MLB, the figure reached 18.7 percent in 1981. Today’s 6.8 percent, celebrated as a milestone, remains less than half that peak and remains, critically, a measure only of labor participation. The ownership figure has not changed. It is zero. It has always been zero. The developmental programs that produce more Black players produce more labor for an ownership class that has never included a single African American. Whatever the developmental intention, the structural outcome is the same as it has always been: more Black men supplying the asset that generates wealth for others.

This is not, it must be stressed, an argument against Black Americans playing baseball. It is an argument about what the celebration of their playing, in the absence of ownership, actually signifies. It signifies that the arrangement Branch Rickey designed in 1947 one in which Black labor would integrate the league while Black ownership was never contemplated has proven durable across nearly eight decades and shows no sign of structural challenge. The 30 franchise owners whose combined wealth now runs into the hundreds of billions of dollars conduct their business in owners’ meetings that have never included an African American voice with the authority that ownership confers. The decisions made in those meetings about labor rules, revenue sharing, market expansion, franchise relocation, broadcast deals are made entirely without African American ownership participation. This is not an oversight. It is the design of the arrangement that Robinson’s entry formalized.

The institutional lessons of this history extend well beyond baseball. The Negro Leagues offer a template not for nostalgia but for analysis: what does it take to build an economic ecosystem that retains capital within a community rather than exporting it to others? The answer, in the Negro Leagues as in other domains, was ownership. When the Kansas City Monarchs played, the revenue stayed within a structure where Black owners, Black managers, Black vendors, and Black communities captured the economic return on Black athletic talent. That structure was dismantled not by force, but by the gravitational pull of integration on terms that never included ownership as a condition.

The HBCU athletic ecosystem faces an analogous set of choices in the present. The temptation to pursue visibility and validation within structures owned and controlled by others (the Power Five conferences, the NCAA tournament apparatus) reproduces the 1947 logic at the college level. As this publication has examined in detail, the HBCU Power Five has a combined all-time record of 4-55 in the NCAA tournament, and the SWAC and MEAC combined typically earn no more than approximately $680,000 in tournament payouts, roughly $34,000 per school when distributed across conference members. The alternative: owning the tournament, controlling the broadcast rights, building an HBCU Athletic Association would produce less spectacle and more capital. It would reproduce, in athletic governance, the logic that Rube Foster understood a century ago: the economic return on Black talent should accrue to Black institutions.

The broader African American institutional ecosystem — Black owned public and private companies, Black financial institutions, professional associations, fraternal organizations, and HBCUs themselves — contains the capacity for the kind of coordinated ownership strategy that MLB has never permitted and that the Negro League era briefly demonstrated was possible. The question is not whether that capacity exists. It is whether the community’s leadership is willing to pursue ownership as a strategic objective rather than labor participation as a cultural achievement. Dr. Anderson’s framework demands that distinction. So does the arithmetic of 30 MLB franchises averaging $3.17 billion in value, every one of them owned by someone who is not African American, generating their returns on a sport whose very mythology of racial progress was built on the back of a Black man who received no ownership stake in exchange for making the mythology possible.

Every April 15th, the number 42 appears on every jersey in Major League Baseball. It is, in its way, an honest accounting. Forty-two is the number of a man whose labor the league appropriated, whose institutional infrastructure it dismantled, and whose memory it now rents annually for its own legitimacy. What would constitute actual progress is the number of African American principal owners in MLB. That number is zero. It has always been zero. Until it changes, Jackie Robinson Day is not a celebration. It is an invoice of unpaid, and accumulating interest.

Disclaimer: This article was assisted by ClaudeAI.

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The Africa Travel Ban Is an HBCU Problem

Posted on April 12, 2026 by | Leave a comment

Africans in the United States must remember that the slave ships brought no West Indians, no Caribbeans, no Jamaicans or Trinidadians or Barbadians to this hemisphere. The slave ships brought only African people and most of us took the semblance of nationality from the places where slave ships dropped us off. – Dr. John H. Clarke

Photo from the Wall Street Journal

The photograph of Majok Bior, a South Sudanese computer science sophomore at Duke University, stranded at his cousin’s home in Kampala after the Trump administration’s travel restrictions invalidated his visa — has circulated widely as a symbol of individual suffering. And it is that. But to read it only through the lens of personal tragedy is to miss the structural dimensions of what is unfolding across American higher education, and to miss, in particular, what this moment means for HBCUs.

The Trump administration’s travel ban, initially signed on June 4, 2025, targeted 12 countries and placed partial restrictions on seven more, covering a geography concentrated in Africa and the Middle East. By December 2025, that list had expanded to 39 countries and territories, with Nigeria, historically one of the top ten sources of international students in the United States, placed under partial restrictions effective January 1, 2026. Individuals in Nigeria will not be able to receive student visas beginning January 1. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has signaled further expansion, with a State Department memo identifying 36 additional countries for potential restriction, including 25 African nations as well as countries in the Caribbean, Central Asia, and the Pacific Islands. If that expansion proceeds, the policy will have effectively severed the institutional connection between American higher education and the African continent.

For HBCUs specifically, this is not a distant geopolitical event. It is a direct threat to an enrollment strategy, a revenue base, and a civilizational relationship that institutions have spent decades building.

To understand the financial stakes, one must first understand how international student enrollment became integral to the fiscal architecture of many HBCUs. In addition to the tuition money international students often bring, many foreign students pay the full sticker price, often aided by their home countries’ governments there are benefits for HBCUs’ American students as well. International students, particularly those arriving with government-funded scholarships from Nigeria, Ghana, Saudi Arabia, and other nations, have served as a reliable source of full-fare tuition revenue at institutions that chronically lack the endowment depth to absorb enrollment volatility.

Among HBCUs with ten or more international students, Morgan State had the most as of the 2017-18 academic year, with 945 students; Howard was second with 920; and Tennessee State third with 584, according to the Institute of International Education. These numbers have only grown. Tennessee State, for instance, went from 77 international undergraduate students in 2008-09 to 549 by fall 2016 representing roughly 8 percent of its undergraduate student body. Across the sector, African students from Nigeria and Ghana historically constituted a significant share of that international cohort.

The financial logic was sound. A university with modest endowment holdings and only one HBCU, Howard University, currently holds an endowment exceeding $1 billion, cannot easily absorb the loss of a tuition-paying population without triggering cascading institutional consequences. When full-fare international students leave an enrollment ledger, the institution must either raise tuition on domestic students who are often already Pell Grant-eligible, draw down reserves, reduce staffing, or curtail academic programs. In a sector where financial fragility is not the exception but the norm, any of those choices carries compounding institutional risk. Preliminary projections by NAFSA and international education research partner JB International predict a 30 to 40 percent decline in new international student enrollment, leading to a 15 percent decline in overall enrollment this fall and loss of $7 billion within local economies and more than 60,000 jobs. That system-wide figure masks the disproportionate exposure at institutions whose international student populations are concentrated in African countries now under restriction.

The financial dimension, however, is only the first tier of the problem. The more consequential loss may be strategic: the slow dismantling of an institutional relationship between HBCUs and Africa that has been a defining feature of both parties’ long-term development. For decades, HBCU campuses have served as one of the primary entry points for African students seeking American credentials and professional networks. The relationship has never been purely transactional. It has been civilizational, rooted in a shared recognition that the institutional capacity of the African diaspora, on both sides of the Atlantic, depends on the training and circulation of its most capable people. Howard University, Morgan State, Florida A&M, and Tennessee State have all cultivated significant African student communities that returned home as engineers, physicians, lawyers, economists, and public administrators, seeding institutions across the continent with HBCU-educated professionals.

That pipeline is now interrupted. Majok Bior is one face of the disruption. He is also, statistically, the kind of student, a full-scholarship computer science talent, whose skills and networks would have contributed meaningfully to either the American or the African institutional ecosystem over the subsequent decades. The State Department’s position is unambiguous. There is no appeals window, no informal pathway, no consular discretion available to students like Bior whose visas were invalidated mid-enrollment. The pipeline does not merely slow. It stops.

The administration has signaled it may further target sub-Saharan Africa for future travel bans. Twenty-four of the 36 countries identified as future ban candidates are in sub-Saharan Africa. If all 24 were to be hit with bans, an additional 71 percent of the region’s population would be affected. At that scale, the policy would not merely interrupt an enrollment channel. It would functionally close the institutional bridge between American HBCUs and the African continent.

The arrivals data make the stakes concrete. The number of new and returning African students arriving in the United States for the 2025 fall semester fell by nearly a third from the previous year, according to preliminary Commerce Department data. Arrivals from Nigeria and Ghana, which historically send more students to the United States than any other African countries, dropped by roughly half. Those are not marginal declines. They represent a structural break in the flow of talent that has sustained both HBCU campuses and the professional networks those campuses anchor.

The broader context amplifies the damage. HBCUs have been managing a long-running tension between their mission to serve African American students and the enrollment arithmetic that increasingly pushes them toward diversification. Black student enrollment at HBCUs increased by just 15 percent from 1976 to 2022, while enrollment of students from other racial and ethnic groups rose by a staggering 117 percent during the same period. Within that context, African international students have occupied an important, if underappreciated, position: they are enrolled students who are Black, who arrive often with external funding, and who align with the cultural mission of the institution in ways that students from other international communities do not. The loss of this population does not merely reduce headcount. It removes a category of student whose presence reinforces the intellectual and cultural identity of HBCU campuses while simultaneously contributing to their revenue base.

HBCU leaders should resist the temptation to treat the current moment as a policy problem requiring a policy solution that is, to wait for a change in administration or a favorable court ruling before taking action. The institutional response must be proactive, and it must be organized at the sector level rather than institution by institution.

The first imperative is legal and advocacy coordination. HBCUs should be visible participants in the coalition of higher education institutions pushing back against travel ban expansion. The legal challenges already filed by some universities have produced limited court-ordered exceptions. HBCU presidents, through their associations and individually, possess a particular moral authority in this argument: these institutions were founded on the principle that the state should not determine who deserves access to education. That founding logic has direct application to the current moment, and its articulation should not be left to the advocacy organizations of predominantly white institutions alone.

The second is the construction of alternative enrollment infrastructure. Several countries whose students are not currently restricted represent significant untapped pipelines for HBCUs including Kenya, Ethiopia, South Africa, and several francophone West African nations not yet under full restriction. Morgan State’s international enrollment tripling between 2014 and 2017, driven by a concerted recruitment strategy, demonstrates that rapid scaling is possible when institutions make it a priority. The question now is whether that kind of deliberate enrollment strategy can be retargeted toward countries where the policy environment remains navigable.

The third imperative, and the most consequential for the long run, is the development of transnational academic infrastructure that does not depend on American visa policy at all and here the sector does not need to theorize. It already has a model. Claflin University, an HBCU in Orangeburg, South Carolina, and Africa University in Zimbabwe have together built and delivered a fully online Master of Science program in Biotechnology and Climate Change, producing their first cohort of graduates in 2025. The program requires no visa, no transatlantic relocation, and no dependence on the goodwill of a State Department consular officer. It delivers graduate-level credentials, anchored to an HBCU’s academic infrastructure, to scholars who remain embedded in the African communities they will eventually serve. That is not a symbolic gesture. It is a replicable institutional architecture — one that severs the link between American immigration policy and the HBCU-Africa educational relationship at precisely the point where that link has proven most vulnerable. The disciplines selected are themselves strategic: biotechnology and climate change are among the fields where African scholars have the most urgent applied work to do, and where the absence of well-trained researchers carries the steepest institutional cost. What Claflin and Africa University have built is a proof of concept for the entire sector. Howard, Morgan State, Florida A&M, and Tennessee State, institutions that have already invested in African student pipelines and cultivated international enrollment are positioned to extend this model into additional disciplines, additional partner institutions, and additional countries. Students who were considering coming in 2026 will be discouraged and will be looking to other destinations, as one international education expert has observed. If those students go elsewhere, HBCUs should be competing to ensure that some of that “elsewhere” is a degree program bearing an HBCU’s name, delivered on African soil, through African partner institutions, and impervious to the policy preferences of any particular American administration.

The image of Majok Bior waiting in Kampala is a human document. But it is also an institutional document. It records the moment when an African student who had successfully navigated the American credentialing system, who had won a full scholarship, enrolled in computer science, played intramural soccer, and survived chemistry class was extracted from that system not by any failure of his own but by a federal policy aimed at restricting the movement of African people into American institutions. HBCUs were built precisely because such exclusions were once the default condition of American higher education. The institutional memory of that history is not a rhetorical resource. It is a strategic asset, a basis for understanding that the institutions which serve communities without consistent access to political protection must always be building structures that can survive the withdrawal of that protection. The Africa travel ban is an HBCU problem. The sector’s response to it will reveal something important about whether these institutions have developed the depth and coordination to meet a challenge that is, in its essential structure, the same challenge they were built to confront.

Disclaimer: This article was assisted by ClaudeAI.

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HBCUs Must Build Their Own Supercomputer: A Blueprint for Computational Sovereignty

Posted on March 3, 2026 by | Leave a comment

We will always have STEM with us. Some things will drop out of the public eye and will go away, but there will always be science, engineering, and technology. And there will always, always be mathematics. – Katherine Johnson

The same institutions that trained Katherine Johnson to calculate trajectories that put Americans on the moon now find themselves locked out of the computational infrastructure powering the next generation of scientific discovery. While Historically Black Colleges and Universities have long punched above their weight in producing Black STEM graduates, they remain systematically excluded from the high-performance computing resources that define cutting-edge research in the new era of AI, quantum computing, and supercomputers. It’s time for HBCUs to stop asking for access and start building their own.

The case for a Pan-HBCU supercomputer and quantum computing initiative is about survival, sovereignty, and strategic positioning in an economy where computational power increasingly determines who owns the future and who rents access to it.

Today’s research landscape is brutally simple: no supercomputer, no competitive research. Climate modeling, drug discovery, materials science, artificial intelligence, genomics, and aerospace engineering all require computational resources that most HBCUs simply cannot access at scale. While predominantly white institutions boast partnerships with national laboratories and billion-dollar computing centers, HBCU researchers often wait in lengthy queues for limited time on shared systems—if they can access them at all.

The numbers tell a stark story. According to the National Science Foundation, the top 50 research universities in computing infrastructure investment include zero HBCUs. Meanwhile, institutions like MIT, Stanford, and Carnegie Mellon operate dedicated supercomputing facilities that give their researchers 24/7 access to the tools that generate patents, publications, and licensing revenue.

This isn’t an accident. It’s the architecture of exclusion, and it’s costing African America billions in lost patents, forfeited breakthroughs, and surrendered market position. Every HBCU chemistry professor who can’t run molecular dynamics simulations is a drug that won’t be discovered. Every computer science department that can’t train large language models is an AI company that won’t be founded. Every physics researcher who can’t process particle collision data is a technology that someone else will own. This is about power—economic power, technological power, the power to shape industries rather than simply participate in them.

If the supercomputing gap is concerning, the emerging quantum divide is existential. Quantum computing represents a fundamental shift in computational paradigms with implications for cryptography, drug design, optimization problems, and artificial intelligence. Nations and corporations are investing billions to establish quantum supremacy, and the institutions that control this technology will own the intellectual property, set the standards, and capture the economic value of the next century of innovation.

HBCUs cannot afford to be spectators in this revolution. The breakthroughs that quantum-accelerated research could deliver everything from targeted therapies for diseases that disproportionately affect Black Americans to predictive models for climate impacts on Southern and coastal Black communities represent billions in economic value. More importantly, they represent the difference between being technology consumers and technology owners. Between licensing other people’s patents and collecting royalties on your own. But only if HBCUs control their own infrastructure. Or better yet, build it collectively.

Imagine a single, HBCU-owned computational facility, a crown jewel of Black academic infrastructure rivaling Los Alamos or Oak Ridge. Not distributed nodes competing for resources, but a unified campus where HBCUs collectively own land, buildings, and the machines that will mint the next generation of Black technological wealth. This is the computational arm of the HBCU Exploration Institute: a physical place where supercomputers hum, quantum processors compute, and HBCU researchers control access rather than beg for it.

The location matters. This facility needs to be somewhere politically friendly to ambitious Black institution-building, with favorable tax treatment, low energy costs, and infrastructure support. Four locations stand out:

New Mexico: Adjacent to Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories, with existing fiber infrastructure, favorable renewable energy costs, and a state government actively recruiting research facilities. New Mexico offers technical talent spillover, dry climate ideal for precision equipment, and proximity to Native American sovereign nations experienced in building independent institutions.

Puerto Rico: Tax incentives under Acts 20 and 22 (now Act 60) make it the Caribbean’s premier location for high-tech operations. Abundant renewable energy potential, especially solar, combined with federal research dollars without federal income tax on certain operations. Added benefit: positions HBCUs as bridge between U.S. and Caribbean research ecosystems.

Maine: Northern climate perfect for cooling systems, cheap hydroelectric power, and a state government hungry for high-tech economic development. Access to Canadian research partnerships, Atlantic subsea cable landing stations for data connectivity, and political environment favorable to institutional autonomy.

U.S. Virgin Islands: Caribbean location with full U.S. federal research funding access, generous tax incentives, and positioning as gateway to African and Caribbean collaborations. Year-round operation of field stations and research vessels, with computational infrastructure supporting the marine and atmospheric research missions.

The model is straightforward but transformative. HBCUs contribute capital to the HBCU Exploration Institute to purchase 200-500 acres outright. The land becomes HBCU property that is collectively owned, governed by an HBCU board, generating wealth for HBCU institutions in perpetuity. This isn’t leasing. This is ownership. A single state-of-the-art facility would house exascale supercomputers, quantum processors, AI training clusters, and massive data storage. Economies of scale mean more computing power per dollar than distributed nodes. Concentrated talent means better recruitment and retention. One campus means one set of operating costs, one power bill, one maintenance team.

HBCUs buy in based on their research needs and financial capacity. Larger contributors get more computational allocation and board representation, but every participating HBCU gets guaranteed access. Small institutions pool resources to punch above their weight. Research allocation follows ownership stakes, but the baseline ensures even small HBCUs can run competitive projects. Beyond serving HBCU research, the facility operates as a commercial venture. Lease computational time to corporations, government agencies, and international research collaborations. Host corporate AI training runs. Provide data center services. Every dollar generated flows back to participating HBCUs as dividends proportional to ownership stakes.

Adjacent to the computing facility, housing for rotating cohorts of HBCU researchers, graduate students, and undergraduate fellows creates a research village. Three-month to one-year residencies allow HBCU talent to work on computationally intensive projects while building networks across institutions. This becomes the intellectual hub of HBCU computational science, a place where collaborations form, startups launch, and the next generation of Black tech founders cut their teeth.

The sticker shock of supercomputing infrastructure is real but so is the cost of exclusion. A competitive supercomputing facility costs between $100-200 million to build and $10-30 million annually to operate, depending on scale and capability. Quantum computing infrastructure is still evolving, but meaningful access could require $50-75 million in initial investment. These aren’t small numbers, but they’re achievable through a combination of federal investment, private philanthropy, and strategic partnerships.

The first call should be to African American and Diaspora wealth both domestic and international. High-net-worth Black individuals, African tech billionaires, Caribbean family offices, and Diaspora investment networks represent untapped capital that understands the long-term value of Black institutional ownership. These are investors and philanthropists who won’t demand the same strings or ideological alignment tests that mainstream foundations impose. Traditional foundations like Mellon and Gates may follow once momentum builds, but Diaspora capital should lead. This ensures the vision remains accountable to Black communities rather than foundation program officers.

The priority for corporate partnerships should be African American and Diaspora-owned tech companies and investors who understand the strategic value of Black computational sovereignty. Seek partnerships with Black-led private equity firms, African tech entrepreneurs, and Caribbean technology investors before approaching mainstream tech giants. When engaging with companies like Microsoft, Google, IBM, and NVIDIA, structure deals that provide HBCUs with hardware, software, and expertise in exchange for joint research projects and equity participation but ensure HBCUs retain majority control and IP ownership. The goal is capital and resources, not dependence.

Federal funding streams exist like the CHIPS and Science Act, NSF Major Research Instrumentation grants, Department of Energy computing initiatives, and NASA research infrastructure programs though the current political environment makes federal support uncertain at best. HBCUs should build relationships and develop proposals now, but plan for a future administration more committed to research equity. In the meantime, the strategy must center on private capital and revenue generation that doesn’t depend on federal goodwill. Once operational, the facility could generate substantial revenue through commercial computing services, corporate research partnerships, and federal agency contracts. The University of Texas at Austin’s Texas Advanced Computing Center generates tens of millions annually through exactly this model, money that flows back into research capacity and student support. An HBCU-owned facility would channel those revenues directly to participating institutions as dividends proportional to ownership stakes.

The real value of HBCU-owned computational infrastructure goes far beyond the machines themselves. It’s about training the next generation of computational scientists, quantum engineers, and AI researchers who don’t just work for tech companies but found them, own them, and profit from them. Students at HBCUs with robust computing facilities wouldn’t just learn about supercomputers in textbooks they’d gain hands-on experience optimizing code for parallel processing, debugging quantum algorithms, and managing large-scale computational workflows. These aren’t abstract skills; they’re the exact expertise that tech companies and national laboratories desperately need and are willing to pay premium salaries to acquire. More importantly, they’re the skills that enable students to launch their own computational startups rather than simply joining someone else’s.

Faculty recruitment and retention would transform overnight. Try recruiting a top-tier computational chemist or AI researcher to an institution where they’ll spend half their time begging for computing time elsewhere. Now imagine recruiting that same researcher with the promise of dedicated access to world-class computing infrastructure and a path to commercialize their discoveries. The competitive landscape shifts dramatically.

This proposal aligns seamlessly with emerging initiatives like the HBCU Exploration Institute and the Coleman-McNair HBCU Air & Space Program outlined in recent strategic planning documents. These ambitious programs envision HBCUs leading research expeditions, operating research vessels and aircraft, and conducting aerospace missions. None of this is possible without serious computational infrastructure. Climate modeling for polar expeditions, satellite data processing, aerospace engineering simulations, deep-sea mapping analysis—these all require supercomputing resources. Want to analyze genomic data from newly discovered marine species? Process atmospheric measurements from research aircraft? Model propulsion systems for small satellites? You need computational power, and lots of it.

A Pan-HBCU Computing Consortium wouldn’t just support these exploration initiatives it would accelerate them, turning HBCUs into genuine leaders in exploratory science rather than junior partners dependent on others’ computational generosity. And every discovery, every patent, every breakthrough would belong to HBCU institutions and their researchers.

The window for building this capacity is closing. As quantum computing matures and AI systems become more computationally intensive, the institutions with infrastructure will accelerate away from those without. The gap between computational haves and have-nots will become unbridgeable, and HBCUs will be permanently relegated to second-tier research status which means second-tier revenue, second-tier patents, and second-tier wealth creation.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. The HBCU community has something that other institutions don’t: a shared mission, deep trust networks, and a history of collective action in the face of systemic exclusion. These institutions didn’t wait for permission to educate Black students when others wouldn’t. They didn’t wait for invitations to produce world-class scientists and engineers. They built their own institutions and proved the doubters wrong.

The same spirit that created HBCUs in the first place, the audacious belief that Black excellence could not be contained or denied must now be channeled into building the computational infrastructure these institutions need to compete and win in the 21st century. The question isn’t whether HBCUs can afford to build their own supercomputer and quantum computing infrastructure. The question is whether they can afford not to. In a world where computational power increasingly determines who shapes the future and who profits from it, HBCUs must choose between dependence and ownership.

The choice should be obvious. It’s time to build.

Disclaimer: This article was assisted by ClaudeAI.

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Teaching the Next Generation: A Guide to Empowering African American Youth Through Strategic Philanthropy

Posted on February 10, 2026 by | Leave a comment

A single twig breaks, but the bundle of twigs is strong. – Tecumseh

The tradition of giving runs deep in African American communities. From the mutual aid societies formed during enslavement to the church collections that funded the Civil Rights Movement, Black Americans have always understood that our collective survival depends on our willingness to invest in one another. Yet somewhere between necessity and aspiration, we’ve lost the language to teach our children that philanthropy isn’t charity—it’s power.

Teaching African American children ages 5-18 about philanthropy means doing more than dropping coins in a collection plate. It means helping them understand that strategic giving builds the institutions that will protect, educate, and employ them throughout their lives. It means showing them that every dollar they contribute to Black-led organizations is a vote for their own future.

Starting Early: Philanthropy for Elementary Ages (5-10)

Young children understand fairness instinctively. They know when something isn’t right, and they want to help fix it. This natural empathy creates the perfect foundation for introducing philanthropic concepts.

Begin with concrete examples from African American history. Tell them about the Free African Society, founded in 1787 by Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, which provided mutual aid to Black Philadelphians. Explain how enslaved people pooled resources to purchase freedom for family members. These aren’t abstract concepts they’re survival strategies that became institutional frameworks.

Create a family giving jar where children can contribute a portion of their allowance or gift money. Let them research and choose a Black-led organization to support quarterly. This could be a local youth program, a historical preservation society, or an HBCU scholarship fund. The key is giving them agency in the decision-making process. When children see their small contributions combine with others to create meaningful impact, they begin to understand collective power.

Use storytelling to illustrate how institutions are built. Talk about how HBCUs were created because white institutions excluded Black students. Explain how Mary McLeod Bethune started a school with $1.50 and turned it into Bethune-Cookman University. Show them that great institutions often begin with small, consistent contributions from people who understood the long game.

Middle School: Understanding Institutional Building (11-13)

By middle school, children can grasp more sophisticated concepts about how money moves and how power is built. This is when we introduce them to the difference between charity and institutional philanthropy.

Charity addresses immediate needs—feeding the hungry, clothing the poor. Institutional philanthropy builds the structures that create long-term change: schools, hospitals, community development corporations, legal defense funds, policy organizations. Both matter, but only institutional philanthropy shifts power dynamics.

Teach them about the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, established in 1940. Explain how sustained philanthropic support allowed lawyers like Thurgood Marshall to develop the legal strategy that led to Brown v. Board of Education. This wasn’t a one-time donation it was years of investment that transformed American society.

Introduce the concept of endowments and investment income. Too many African American organizations operate in perpetual crisis mode, chasing donations year after year. Show students the difference between an organization with a $100,000 annual budget that must be fundraised every twelve months and an organization with a $2 million endowment generating $80,000 annually in investment income. The second organization can focus on mission instead of survival.

Start a philanthropy club at school or in your community. Let students identify a need in their community and develop a giving circle to address it. They should practice everything: setting fundraising goals, researching organizations, making collective decisions, tracking impact, and understanding how their contributions grow through consistent giving. This hands-on experience transforms abstract concepts into practical skills.

High School: Strategic Power Building (14-18)

High school students are ready to understand philanthropy as a tool for social, economic, and political empowerment. They can analyze power structures and recognize how institutional support or the lack thereof shapes outcomes in Black communities.

Teach them to read institutional budgets and annual reports. Show them how to evaluate whether an organization has sufficient reserves, how much goes to programs versus overhead, and whether they’re building long-term sustainability. This financial literacy is essential for effective philanthropy.

Explore the concept of investment income in depth. Many students don’t realize that major institutions—universities, museums, hospitals—operate primarily on endowment income, not annual fundraising. Harvard’s endowment generated approximately $2.3 billion in investment income in recent years. Imagine if HBCUs collectively had similar resources. Explain that building Black institutional power requires moving beyond the donation mentality to an investment mindset.

Discuss how philanthropy intersects with political power. Show them how think tanks, policy organizations, and advocacy groups are funded. Explain that when Black communities don’t adequately fund our own policy organizations, others define the agenda affecting our lives. The Tea Party movement and its affiliated organizations received hundreds of millions in philanthropic support that reshaped American politics. What might be possible if African American communities invested similarly in organizations advancing our interests?

Examine collective philanthropy models. Traditional philanthropy often centers wealthy donors making large gifts. But collective giving where many people contribute smaller amounts has always been the African American philanthropic model. From church building funds to contemporary giving circles, we’ve understood that our strength lies in numbers. Today’s technology makes collective philanthropy more powerful than ever. A thousand people giving $100 monthly creates $1.2 million annually enough to endow a scholarship, support a community organization, or launch a new initiative.

Encourage students to start giving now, even if it’s $5 monthly to an organization they believe in. The habit matters more than the amount. A teenager who gives $10 monthly from age 16 to 66 contributes $6,000 in direct donations, but if that money is invested and earns average returns, it represents tens of thousands in institutional support.

Teaching African American youth about philanthropy means helping them understand its components and how they work together to build institutional power.

Educational Institutions: HBCUs, independent schools, scholarship funds, and educational support organizations create pathways to opportunity and preserve cultural knowledge. Sustained philanthropic support allows these institutions to build endowments, improve facilities, and attract top faculty and students.

Economic Development: Community development corporations, Black-owned business incubators, affordable housing organizations, and loan funds build wealth and economic stability. These institutions require patient capital and sustained support to create generational impact.

Legal and Policy Organizations: Civil rights organizations, legal defense funds, policy think tanks, and advocacy groups shape the rules that govern society. Inadequate funding in this sector means Black interests remain underrepresented in policy formation.

Cultural Institutions: Museums, historical societies, arts organizations, and media companies preserve our stories and shape narratives. Control over our cultural narrative requires institutional infrastructure that only sustained philanthropy can build.

Health and Social Services: Community health centers, mental health organizations, and social service providers address immediate needs while building the institutional capacity to serve Black communities long-term.

Each component requires different funding strategies. Some need operating support, others need capital for buildings or technology, many need endowment building. Teaching youth to think strategically about where and how they give helps them maximize impact.

The most important lesson we can teach African American children about philanthropy is that it’s not optional it’s essential. Every community that has built institutional power has done so through sustained, strategic philanthropy. Jewish communities support Jewish institutions. Asian American communities support Asian American institutions. African American communities must do the same.

Start conversations early. Make giving a family practice. Teach children to evaluate organizations critically. Help them understand that building Black institutional power is a marathon, not a sprint. Show them that their contributions, combined with others, create the schools, organizations, and institutions that will serve generations to come.

This isn’t about guilt or obligation. It’s about power, self-determination, and legacy. When we teach our children that philanthropy is institution-building, we give them tools to shape their own future rather than waiting for others to determine it for them.

The question isn’t whether African American communities can afford to invest in our institutions. The question is whether we can afford not to.

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