A few years ago, I coauthored an article with the New York University professor Valerie Lundy-Wagner on black men at historically black colleges and universities. Using data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, we found that black men perform equally well at historically black colleges and majority institutions. Research on HBCUs and degree attainment tells us that African-Americans perform better and are more likely to graduate if they attend an HBCU; however, those gains are, by and large, attributable to black women. That said, there are HBCUs that outperform majority institutions, including Morehouse College.
Ronald Mason Jr., the president of the Southern University System in Louisiana, is spearheading a new program focused on empowering black men. With support from the Louisiana legislature and the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, the Southern system is creating the Honoré Center for Undergraduate Student Achievement. The center is named for General Russell Honoré, who was the military commander on the ground in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.
The Honoré Center is a partnership between Southern University of New Orleans (a historically black university) and Delgado Community College, and its goal is to increase the participation of black male degree holders in the city and to increase those individuals’ opportunities to pursue advanced degrees. Moreover, Mason wants to create a replicable program that can be used throughout the Southern system and at other HBCUs to ensure the success of black men and to keep them out of the prison system.
In Louisiana, for instance, while black men make up 32 percent of the population, they account for 66 percent of the prison population. According to Mason, “The impact of this pipeline to prison on people, families, communities, and society as a whole is profound. Unemployment fosters crime and leads to fatherless homes, underprepared toddlers, underperforming students, dropouts, and underprepared high-school graduates, which leads back to under employment, unemployment, and crime.”
Of note, the SUNO/Delgado program will be residential and will focus on holistic learning, including high-level retention strategies, continual assessment, and mentoring. In addition, and more important, the program aims to increase the success rate of students from pre-school through the time they enter college, and will do this by engaging the parents and grandparents of black male students. The Honoré Center will also host an Institute for Parents and Grandparents that will emphasize prenatal health, early-childhood learning, and mental and physical health.
From Mason’s perspective, the Southern system is poised to tackle these issues because of its historic mission. HBCUs have been addressing social and community issues since their founding after the Civil War.
Through these efforts, Mason hopes to decrease New Orleans’s black male prison population by hacking away at the school-to-prison pipeline by means of education. What I like best about Mason’s approach is that he calls it “reclaiming and developing black male human capital.” This is yet another example of a historically black institution adhering to its original social-justice mission and tackling problems that many in the public and private sector are ignoring or worse yet, perpetuating.
