There’s been a lot of national news/noise about HBCUs since Coach Deion Sanders left Jackson State University and NFL Hall of Famer Ed Reed was denied the head coach job at Bethune-Cookman University. Yet, while the circus of hot takes circulate, one thing remains true. The issue, like most issues in black life, comes down to white supremacy intersecting with Negro ineptitude, but not in ways that most folks—black or white—grasp. For instance, during Coach Sanders’s two-year tenure as JSU’s football coach, much of the negativity directed at JSU came from African Americans who attended predominately white institutions (PWIs) or African Americans who just never had any engagement or connection to HBCUs. That’s not to say there weren’t also slights from the usual white-supremacist suspects, but most of the vile, dismissive, and marginalizing comments about Jackson State came from black folks attending PWIs as well as some black folks attending HBCUs. (I can never forget that it was a Morgan State alum known online as MEAC Mike who said that “Jackson State losing to Campbell (a PWI) would be better than sex.” Even though that’s classic self-hated, it’s somewhat tame compared to the disparaging comments made by African Americans attending PWIs.) Yet, only now, with Coach Sanders leaving JSU and the Reed/Bethune-Cookman saga, is America seeing a full display of the self-hatred that exists within black communities. What’s worse is how white supremacists manipulate intra-racial tensions, enabled by the truth that people who hate themselves can only see the worst of themselves and cannot fathom the nuanced ways in which outside forces continue to twist black life. So, while the carnival of self-hate continues its carousel, very few people realize that white racist Mississippi politicians are seizing this moment of black-on-black conflict to write laws that would further undermine Afro-Mississippians’ ability to govern themselves.
On the heels of the Jackson water crisis, Mississippi Republican State Senator David Parker has authored Senate Bill 2889, “Mississippi Capitol Region Utility Act,” which will transfer ownership of Jackson’s water utility system from the city to a nine-member board controlled by the governor rather than the mayor, once the work of federally appointed third party administrator Ted Henifin is complete. Parker, one of Mississippi Governor Tater Tot’s lackeys, has proposed this bill because Ole Tater Tot is still pissed that he was unable to gain control of the 600 million dollars that Congressman Bennie Thompson secured to repair Jackson’s water system. (And, now, we get into the weeds of politics that are not as exciting as black folks acting a fool and attacking each other on social media.) The evil of SB 2889 is two-fold. One, ever since white people lost control of Jackson, and the city was able to elect its first black major in 1997, the vast majority of white Mississippians have worked to find ways to ensure its economic collapse. For instance, once the writing was on the wall that black folks had the majority vote in the city, the last white mayor, in conjunction with other white folks, worked to transfer the ownership of the Jackson Zoo to a private entity that would relocate the zoo outside the city. Next, these same white folks attempted to seize the Jackson airport and put it under the control of a neighboring white city. Third, they attempted to pass legislation to transfer a ten to twenty-mile radius of downtown Jackson under the control of the state. And, now, along with SB 2889, Mississippi Republican Legislator Trey Lamar has authored a bill that will “create a new court system within Jackson that would have judges and prosecutors appointed by state officials, not Jackson voters.”[1]. Add to this that Mississippi Republican “Representative Shanda Yates introduced a key amendment to the State Legislature—HB370…to include the removal of duly elected municipal officials from public office with a petition signed by 30% of the electorate and a written statement of no less than 200 words spelling out why the particular officer in question should be removed”[2]. If the white insurrection on January 6 has taught us nothing else, it has taught us that the vast majority of white folks still operate under the assumption that informed the Dred Scott ruling: “black people have no rights that white people are bound to respect.” As such, white Mississippians, who still represent sixty-four percent of the state’s population and vote ninety percent Republican, are doing all that they can to ensure and perpetuate the second-class citizenship of Afro-Mississippians. However, the local and national narrative continues to be that black folks and HBCUs are lazy, ignorant, dishonest, and the cause of all of their problems, which is the same rhetoric that led to the dismantling of Reconstruction. All of these political actions by racist whites emanate from white fear of black sovereignty, especially black sovereignty that leads to black economic independence. Passing these bills will guarantee that Jackson is unable to repair its infrastructure to build an independent economic base for itself. The 600 million dollars secured by Congressman Thompson not only restore the basic right of black folks to have water; it is a great step to priming the pump—this time the pun is intended—toward the economic development of Jackson.
Given the prospects for such development, two recent events scared the crap out of racist white Mississippians. First, in 2021 when national football powerhouse Alabama played Ole Miss in Oxford, Mississippi, the JSU-Alabama State game on the same day in Jackson drew one thousand more fans than the Alabama-Ole Miss game. While a lot of Jacksonians don’t like former NFL QB and current ESPN commentator Jay Walker, he was correct when he stated that the biggest “Prime Effect” is that Sanders awakened a sleeping giant. JSU has always had one of the largest and most active HBCU fan bases, being the only HBCU to lead the FCS in attendance, doing so multiple times before Coach Sanders arrived. Second, in the past two years, JSU Football has generated close to sixty million dollars for the Jackson-Metro area while its games have higher TV ratings than all other white FCS programs. For the first time in Mississippi history, black labor has benefited black people economically, and these evil-ass white folks in Mississippi cannot allow that to happen. Unfortunately, some of the biggest detractors to this JSU and HBCU renaissance have been black folks, particularly black folks attending PWIs. To be clear, not all black folks attending PWIs have disparaged this renaissance. (Props to Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of The 1619 Project, for coming to the defense of JSU when Roland Martin made his erroneous comments about JSU and HBCU alumni financial contributions to their schools.) But, again, the vast majority of folks seeking to lampoon this renaissance have been African Americans who attended PWIs along with a few HBCU folks, such as the aforementioned MEAC Mike and Negro buffoons like Carron Phillips, a writer for Deadspin, who thinks that black folks can’t chew gum and walk at the same time. This is why he won’t face the facts that Jackson State University has produced four NFL Hall of Famers while also being the second-oldest Level 2 Research HBCU in the country. Jackson State has always been a powerhouse of academics and athletics, but, now, it is finding a way to monetize its excellence in ways like never before. That terrifies the vast majority of Mississippi’s white folks (and is probably a subliminal threat to white Americans Up South who have what James Baldwin called selective naïveté when it comes to Mississippi and black institutions in general). As such, they are doing all that they can to stop this momentum, and the heavy lifting is being done by Negro stooges, such as Willie D of the Geto Boys, Roland Martin, Gilbert “Pistol Packing” Arenas, Shannon Sharpe, and Uncle Luke aka Luke Skywalker aka Luther Campbell. (By the way, did Campbell infer (dry snitch) that Bret Favre was working to include Coach Sanders in the Mississippi welfare fraud scandal by introducing Sanders to Ole Tater Tot to get additional “funding”? Either Sanders lied to Campbell, or Campbell lied on Sanders. Either way, are Favre and Tater really the types of people with whom Coach Sanders wants his name and reputation associated?)
The question isn’t whether or not HBCUs have problems. We know that they have problems because the white power structure never intended these institutions to be more than pseudo-plantations that administered what iconic civil rights leader Bob Moses deemed sharecropper curriculums. Yet, unlike Reed, folks like JSU Women’s Basketball Coach Tomekia Reed, Tennessee State University Football Coach Eddie George, Florida A&M University Football Coach Willie Simmons, and Grambling State University Football Coach Hue Jackson have all come to work rather than to complain and berate the institutions that employ them. (Ironically, none of these coaches were educated at an HBCU, but they all accepted the challenge to help make their HBCU thrive because they respect the mission of the schools and are grateful for the opportunity provided by an HBCU. This is also why Alabama State University Football Coach Eddie Robinson, Jr., asserting who is and who ain’t SWAC is just plain stupid because fifty percent of the winningest SWAC football coaches didn’t play or attend SWAC schools, including GSU’s Eddie Robinson [no relation] and Alcorn State University’s Marino Casem, known as the Godfather of the SWAC.) Say what one will about Coach Sanders, he never berated JSU while he was its football coach even though some think he constantly disrespected the level of HBCU sports. It was only after Sanders and his supporters were shocked by the amount of national outrage from folks upset with him leaving JSU that he and his minions began to attack JSU and, by extension, HBCUs. The irony is that very few Jacksonians had anything negative to say about Coach Sanders leaving because the vast majority of us knew that we were renting a coach. The outrage tended to come from folks not associated with JSU. And, this provoked Sanders’ supporters, especially those African Americans associated with PWIs, to make it open season on JSU and HBCUs. Yet, blaming Coach Sanders exclusively for the negative attacks against JSU and HBCUs is like blaming former President Donald J. Trump aka Agent Orange for the rise in explicit racism. Both may have primed the pump—pun unintended, but those sentiments always existed and were merely awaiting an avenue to be expressed loudly. This is why it’s important that, like Richard Wright, more black folks develop the intelligence and the courage to confront white supremacy and Negro ineptitude simultaneously.
Those of us in the HBCU community have regularly discussed the administrative issues of HBCUs, including BCU’s recent issues. (My alma mater, JSU, is now deadlocked in a fierce debate over the new academic curriculum proposed by the administration, which has led to the faculty senate issuing a vote of no confidence for its president who has earned high praise over the past couple of years. Yet, when this happens at PWIs, it’s called necessary ideological debate, but when it happens at HBUCs, it’s called dysfunction. Despite the mislabeling of their issues, HBCUs don’t shy from our external or internal issues.) This is why I was puzzled at the initial announcement of Ed Reed as BCU’s new football coach because I was aware of the institution’s financial struggles. The question isn’t whether or not BCU deserves a great coach because it’s currently ranked in the top ten of HBCUs with the most football victories, proving its historical athletic excellence. Yet, because this institution is still struggling from an administrative realignment, even as its campus has been hit with two major hurricanes in two months, BCU just doesn’t have the resources for a coach, such as Reed. And, maybe I should say, Reed doesn’t have the intelligence, courage, patience, and honor of the aforementioned coaches, such as T. Reed, George, Simmons, and Jackson. Again, Reed’s rant against the state of BCU’s practice field should not be confused with Sanders’ complaints about JSU’s practice field since Sanders found a solution to the problem. Now, JSU has one of the best practice fields and one of the best locker rooms in the SWAC. It seems that working behind the scenes to pool revenue from various donors is much more effective than going live and calling your potential boss a muthafucka. (Reed said muthafucka so many times on his two livestreams that I thought he was making a remix to Prince’s “Sexy MF,” but I digress.) Sadly, this is logic that self-hating folks just can’t fathom. Self-loathing Negroes can’t see the reality of the two hurricanes; they can only see the debris left behind and blame BCU for being in the path of the hurricane. These folks love to take isolated issues on black campuses as a symbol for all that is wrong with HBCUs but never cite something like the four students killed at the University of Idaho as a thumbnail for all PWIs. They love to quote the thirty-five percent graduation rate of HBCUs but never tell that only thirty-nine percent of African-Americans attending PWIs graduate. (I guess they don’t know that folks from Brown University have met regularly with folks from Tougaloo College to help increase the graduation rate of their black students.) And, they love to highlight the facilities that need maintenance at HBCUs, but they never explain that, despite this shortcoming, HBCUs continue to produce eighty percent of black judges, fifty percent of black lawyers, fifty percent of black doctors, and twenty percent of black STEM graduates. Furthermore, the study, HBCUs Transforming Generations: Social Mobility Outcomes for HBCU Alumni, shows that thirty-four percent of students who enter HBCUs from the lower-economic class rise to the middle-economic class, which is more than double the number for PWIs[3] (Greenfield). HBCUs seem to be doing a better job of improving the quality of life and providing upward mobility for African Americans than PWIs, but this is not the type of information that drives the Americana narrative.
In the next couple of months, the city of Jackson and all Afro-Mississippians will be in a battle for their political lives, and very few people will know about it. Even fewer of those folks will discuss it nationally because that’s not as sexy and self-gratifying as black-on-black defamation on social media. Jackson, Mississippi, is struggling because it doesn’t have a tax base, and there are two reasons for that. One, the black middle class followed the white flight from the city. (All people have the right to live where they want to live. But, white flight never destroys a city. It’s when the black middle class flees a city that it implodes because even the majority of black folks don’t believe that they have the intelligence and morality to be sovereign.) Two, the racist white Mississippi power structure does all it can to create laws and other hurdles to ensure that black folks cannot save themselves. And, in the end, it will be mostly black folks who say, “See, I told you that them niggas ain’t shit” as these same black folks are working consciously and subconsciously to undercut the African-American ability to become sovereign beings. To that point, I will leave y’all with the words of Prince’s “The Exodus Has Begun”:
Spatch cocks in black face offer us pennies/When it’s millions and millions upon millions they reap/How in the world can we call ourselves equal/ When their wages outweigh the time that they keep?/ And if they stood up and behaved like the humans they’re supposed/ As opposed to the way they are not/ Then this New Power Soul would not be so soulful And the [hell] they’re in would not be so hot/ Behold the children of the New Power are more and mightier than you/ You that have scorned and held back the inevitable/ Must now come to grips with the truth/ All that is good in the eyes of heaven/ Will rebuke your powder monkey ways (Have mercy)/ And let that same heaven have mercy/ When the wrath of the sun knocks upon your gate!
It’s time for an exodus in which black folks finally free themselves from the grip of white supremacy. To do this, we must do as Franz Fanon urges—kill the oppressor that lives in our collective mind. Only then, will we recreate the Black Exodus of The Great Migration of black folks fleeing the slavery of the South. Yet, black folks also learned, which is illuminated in Wright’s Black Boy, that the North was not Negro Heaven either. Therefore, this latest incarnation of the Black Exodus must be one in which black folks merge the best aspects of W. E. B. Du Bois with Booker T. Washington, the best aspects of Frederick Douglass with Marcus Garvey, and the best aspects of Martin Luther King, Jr., with Malcolm X to form a more perfect union in which college prep and trade school curriculums merge into liberation blueprints. But, the black community continues to be like a poorly-coached team that can’t stop jumping offside and can’t stop fumbling in the red zone. In the city of Jackson and many cities across America, multiple Nat Turners have been successful in taking control of their land, creating multiple iterations of what Parliament/Funkadelic called “Chocolate City.” As such, the only questions that remain are: now that we have control, what will we do with it, and how many African Americans will work to develop our cities into Wakanda or work with our colonizers to return our cities to plantations?
NOTES
[1] Perlis, Wicker. “Bill in legislature Would Take Sole Ownership of Jackson Water System from City.” Clarion Ledger.com, 25 January 2023, https://www.clarionledger.com/story/news/politics/2023/01/25/jackson-mississippi-could-lose-control-of-troubled-water-system/69840075007/. Accessed 26 January 2023.
[2] Braxton, Charlie. “Opinion: Thoughts on HB370.” Jackson Advocate Online.com, 23 January 2023, https://jacksonadvocateonline.com/thoughts-on-hb370/. Accessed 26 January 2023.
[3] Greenfield, Nathan M. “HBCUs Lead at Propelling Graduates into the Middle Class.” University World News.com, 3 December 2021, https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20211203090156622. Accessed 26 January 2023.