The State Must Provide
The Definitive History of Racial Inequality in American Higher Education
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
“A book that both taught me so much and also kept me on the edge of my seat. It is an invaluable text from a supremely talented writer.” —Clint Smith, author of How the Word is Passed
The definitive history of the pervasiveness of racial inequality in American higher education
America’s colleges and universities have a shameful secret: they have never given Black people a fair chance to succeed. From its inception, our higher education system was not built on equality or accessibility, but on educating—and prioritizing—white students. Black students have always been an afterthought. While governments and private donors funnel money into majority white schools, historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), and other institutions that have high enrollments of Black students, are struggling to survive, with state legislatures siphoning away federal funds that are legally owed to these schools. In The State Must Provide, Adam Harris reckons with the history of a higher education system that has systematically excluded Black people from its benefits.
Harris weaves through the legal, social, and political obstacles erected to block equitable education in the United States, studying the Black Americans who fought their way to an education, pivotal Supreme Court cases like Plessy v. Ferguson and Brown v. Board of Education, and the government’s role in creating and upholding a segregated education system. He explores the role that Civil War–era legislation intended to bring agricultural education to the masses had in creating the HBCUs that have played such a major part in educating Black students when other state and private institutions refused to accept them.
The State Must Provide is the definitive chronicle of higher education’s failed attempts at equality and the long road still in front of us to remedy centuries of racial discrimination—and poses a daring solution to help solve the underfunding of HBCUs. Told through a vivid cast of characters, The State Must Provide examines what happened before and after schools were supposedly integrated in the twentieth century, and why higher education remains broken to this day.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Atlantic staff writer Harris debuts with a sharp and vigorous examination of "the lasting wounds of segregation in higher education." He traces the battle over equal access from the establishment of the South's first integrated college in 1855, through the Jim Crow era, when Southern states such as Missouri avoided creating in-state programs for Black graduate students by paying to send them to schools in other states, to recent Supreme Court decisions against race-conscious admissions that have kept Black enrollments disproportionately low. The history is enriched with vivid portraits of pioneers such as George Washington Carver, who attended Iowa's Simpson College in 1891; Ada Lois Sipuel Fisher, on whose behalf the NAACP fought to integrate the University of Oklahoma; and Lloyd Gaines, who disappeared after winning his discrimination lawsuit against the University of Missouri School of Law. Harris concludes with a look at contemporary battles over state funding for historically Black colleges and universities and efforts by students and scholars, including Ruth Simmons, the first Black president of an Ivy League university, to examine the "legacies of slavery and discrimination" at American colleges. Fluently organized and lucidly written, this thought-provoking exposé is a worthy contribution to the debate over how to make American education more equitable.
