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Marybeth Gasman, Valerie Lundy-Wagner, Tafaya Ransom, and Nelson Bowman III. Unearthing Promise and Potential: Our Nation's Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley & Sons, 2010. 131 pp. Paper: $29.00. ISBN 978-0-4706-3510-0.
Unearthing Promise and Potential: Our Nation's Historically Black Colleges and Universities is an ambitious attempt to examine the historical inception of HBCUs in the United States, their present role in higher education, and their potential future. These institutions-very diverse despite being grouped under the homogenous HBCU definition and label-have remained a vital part of the American higher education landscape for more than 125 years. As Marybeth Gasman, Valerie Lundy-Wagner, Tafaya Ransom, and Nelson Bowman III set forth, these institutions indeed offer great promise and potential for the continued and higher education of the nation.
In Chapter 1, the authors provide enlightening details surrounding the disparate historical origins of HBCUs, from the pursuit of higher education by free Black people in the North to a wide array of efforts to educate freed slaves in the South after the Civil War. These efforts included those of the Freedman's Bureau established in 1865 and of private groups such as northern White missionary societies and Black churches.
These efforts resulted in an array of HBCUs, such as public institutions established as purportedly separate but equal to southern land grant colleges and private Black colleges founded or supported through the philanthropy of wealthy White industrialists. The authors note that the history of HBCUs sometimes confines outsiders to acknowledging only their historical significance, while failing to see their continuing and crucial role in American higher education.
Chapter 2 presents a concise summary of judicial and legislative commitments, or the lack thereof, that have affected historically Black colleges and universities. Gasman, Lundy-Wagner, Ransom, and Bowman chronicle the policies of educational segregation for Blacks beginning with the initial segregation policies of the 1890s in the aftermath of the Civil War, through legal desegregation in the aftermath of Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka (1954), and onward to the various judicial acts that have since served to "bolster, defeat, and confuse the role of HBCUs in American...