A degree from a black college has always been a valuable gear in the machinery of America’s class system. Early black college graduates emerged as exceptional models of black achievement and uncommon potential as well as leader-spokesmen of a race historically viewed as an industrial commodity.
It is tradition born out of the early post-slavery days when black women and men who were once reduced to chattel, labored to demonstrate their somebodiness to the white missionary teachers at most black schools, and oddly, to their former owners too. But what was — and arguably still is — a strategic attempt to survive racism and white supremacy, has devolved into a totem of assimilation, separating the “bad” black masses from the “good” black elite.
Black colleges, unwittingly or otherwise, have long been forerunners in the tradition now known as black respectability.