Jelani on the HBCU experience

Something of a love letter. And one I deeply understand. I think I got a lot of confidence out of my time at Howard. It's not to say everyone will. Just that I and a lot of others did:

I could make a defense of our cause and run down the names that have come from our halls -- Martin Luther King, Toni Morrison, W.E.B. Du Bois, Thurgood Marshall, Oprah Winfrey -- but I won't turn this post into a index. Instead I'll tell you this: if you ask me what I got from my years at Howard University my answer would require an encyclopedia -  not a W4.

The short version answer to the question would be the fact that I'm writing this post; the fact that you're reading it. This is no hyperbolic claim, not a bumper-sticker if-you-can-read-this-thank-a-teacher shout out, but actual truth. I blew onto Howard's yard in 1987, outsized and insecure, my demeanor a laughable attempt to make the words "New York" function as an adjective. I was the first of my clan to set foot on a university campus, my head  was full of doubts that I was qualified as that nebulous thing known as "college material." My old man finished three grades worth of book-learning in a stoplight town called Hazelhurst, Ga and my mother completed high school, but only after abandoning her native Alabama for Chicago. I was so shook by the alien prospect of higher education that I froze during my first in-class essay for freshman English , convinced that I was not capable of writing a reasonable sentence -- and certainly not a college-worthy one. I turned in a blank page.

My professor took pity on me and encouraged me to come to his office and try again. This time I turned in a semi-coherent offering. He gave it a B -- a grade I was certain was so undeserved that it should qualify as philanthropy. But I grew into myself over the next 14 weeks. I turned in the first weekly essay and received an A -- as I did for the second and the third. By the end of the month students were requesting that I proof-read their papers before they turned them in. I ended the semester amazed that I'd earned 14 consecutive A's.  I came into that class a knot of insecurity. I left it a writer.

I'll also add that for my particular line of work, where race figures in heavily, there really was no better preparation. At Howard, I met black people who I didn't even know existed. We didn't just have half-white, half-black, biracial black folks. We had half-Indian, half-black black folks. We had black folks from cities. Black folks from the burbs. Black folks from the islands. Black folks from the continent. Black folks from Canada. I mean we really had all kinds.

I think seeing that kind of diversity in my collective experience was invaluable, and really animates so much of my writing, and my belief in the diversity/humanity/comedy/dysfunction of black people. It was why I immediately understood that statement by Michelle Obama about Princeton making her aware of her blackness. Half of Howard's campus was made up of young black kids who were tired of feeling that way. It was why I never gave any credence to the idea that growing up in place not known for its black population, made Barack Obama less black. It would have meant that many of my friends at Howard weren't black either. Hell if not for biracial black people, and black people who grew up in virtually all-white environs, Howard would have been bankrupt, like, yesterday.