HBCUs and Prison Education: The New Frontier by gerard robinson, executive director of the center for advancing opportunity at the thurgood marshall college fund
Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) are pioneers in American higher education. They graduated black, white, and Native American women in the arts, sciences and law during the 1880s when many colleges refused to do so. They invented the “movable school” at Tuskegee University to educate rural farmers, which became a model for postsecondary institutions before World War I, and supported intellectuals such as Alain Locke, the first black Rhodes Scholar, as he published foundational thoughts about adult education before World War II. HBCUs also graduate award-winning K-12 educators. Today, HBCUs are embarking on another pioneering endeavor in higher education: providing a college education to a segment of the 2.3 million adults incarcerated in 50 states and the District of Columbia through use of a Pell Grant.
The Christian Monitor
Image by: Melanie Stetson Freeman
HBCUs are not the first to offer a college-inprison program. Postsecondary institutions offered courses to incarcerated men and women as early as the 1940s. Malcolm X, for instance, took college courses while at the Norfolk Penal Colony in Massachusetts. Preparing incarcerated adults to reenter society through rehabilitation work is a pursuit predating the twentieth century. Benjamin Franklin and a group of reformers organized the “Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons” to do so in the 1780s.
30 HBCU Times Summer 2019