A Letter to My White Friends and Colleagues

CHAPTER THREEDonate to HBCUs

I am asking you to help close the Black-White wealth gap by donating at least 8.46% of your annual philanthropic giving to one or more HBCUs for the next five years.

“GET YOUR EDUCATION. It's the only thing they can't take away from you.” These were the words of Zach Hubert Sr., a former slave, speaking to his 12 children.

In 2020, I visited 10 of the 101 HBCUs located in 19 states across the country, as seen in Figure 3.1. (The original schedule was to visit 12, but 2 were cancelled due to COVID-19.) I taught a workshop entitled “Entrepreneurial Finance for Black Entrepreneurs.” It was one of the greatest, most enjoyable experiences of my teaching career. I got the opportunity to teach almost 700 Black students about brilliant Black entrepreneurs who were enormously successful as businessmen and -women, as well as hugely successful at giving back, philanthropically, to the Black community. I use the colleges I visited as a subset of the broader discussion of the current state of HBCUs. (When one of my friends saw the map, he said it looked like a map of stops along the Underground Railroad, a consequence of the fact that I had visited several HBCUs in the deep South, as well as the northern part of the country.)

Figure 3.1 Summary, HBCU Tour.

One of my major takeaways from this tour was that the HBCU coalition should be given a special award ...