Black Male HBCU Enrollment Is at Its Lowest in Nearly 50 Years. Here’s Why That Matters.
What We Lost When We Fired 100,000 Black Teachers
The following comes from my upcoming book Blackenomics. Click here to support Independent Black Journalism.
In 2023, Black male enrollment at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) dropped to its lowest point in nearly half a century. Just 28,000 Black men were enrolled across all HBCUs, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. That’s a historic low and a crisis hidden in plain sight. Why does it matter? Because it tells us not just about who’s missing from campuses but who was never welcomed into classrooms in the first place. If we want to understand how we got here, we have to start with the 100,000 Black teachers who were purged after Brown v. Board.
I didn’t have a single Black male teacher in grade school or high school. Before I ever had a Black male teacher—or even saw one in a classroom—I met a woman who taught me what school could be.
Ms. Selma Newton wasn’t a principal or a civil rights icon. She was the librarian at my nearly all-Black elementary school on Chicago’s South Side. She wore her hair natural, dressed in tweed skirt suits, and treated Black children as if we were the absolute center of the universe.
“My Black children,” she’d exclaim, smiling as she threaded the film projector with a documentary or assigned Story of Our People, a radio show that told the history of the civil rights movement. Ms. Newton didn’t just teach us our history; she insisted we understand our role in it. It’s only in retrospect that I realize how rare that experience was. I didn’t know then that for generations, teachers just like Ms. Newton had been the backbone of Black education. That is, until they got pushed out.
Brown Won, and Black Educators Lost
Most Americans learn that Brown v. Board of Education ended segregation in schools. But we rarely hear about what else it did. The 1954 Supreme Court ruling also sparked the near-total dismantling of the Black teaching profession.
Before Brown, nearly half of all college-educated Black Southerners worked in education. In the 17 states with legally segregated schools, Black teachers made up between 35% and 50% of all educators. But when Black students were supposedly integrated into white schools, their teachers and principals were left behind. Black schools were shut down. Tens of thousands of Black educators were demoted, dismissed, or quietly pushed out.
Dr. Leslie Fenwick, dean emerita of Howard University’s School of Education, calls this “Jim Crow’s Pink Slip.” And she makes it plain: “The wholesale firing of Black educators was not an unintended consequence of desegregation—it was an unstated goal.” The system that replaced them was never built for the students they left behind.
The Disappearance of Belonging
That loss wasn’t just about jobs—it was about identity, safety, and belonging.
When I started high school at St. Ignatius College Prep in Chicago, there was only one Black teacher in the building: Mr. Arthur Reliford. He taught biology and coached basketball, but more than that, he was the school’s cultural anchor for Black students. Though I never had him in class, he looked out for me. He was the soft landing in a place that was too hard on Black men and boys.
Today, Black children make up more than 15% of America’s public-school population. But only 7% of teachers are Black—and just 2% are Black men. And that 2% matters. One Black teacher between kindergarten and third grade increases a Black student’s likelihood of graduating high school by 13% and attending college by 19%. For low-income Black boys, it cuts the dropout rate by nearly 40%.
That should be the end of the essay right there. If you want to know why so few Black students go to college, it lies in that one number: 2%. If only 2% of teachers were white women, I’d argue you’d see a similar result.
The First Time I Saw a Black Man at the Front of a Classroom
It took until junior year of college before I saw a Black man at the head of a classroom.
The course was The Black Religious Experience. It was taught by the Reverend Dr. John Cartwright.
Dr. John Henderson Cartwright was born in Louisiana in 1933. He studied at Morehouse College—classmates with both Barbara Jordan and Martin Luther King Jr.—and earned advanced degrees in theology and philosophy. In 1976, he became the first Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Social Ethics at Boston University, where he taught until retiring in 2004.
Cartwright was known for deep scholarship and calm authority. A jazz musician in his youth, his pacing was deliberate, his style cool, his presence unmistakable. He didn’t lecture; he listened. He didn’t raise his voice; he waited.
On the first day, in a nearly all-white classroom, he wrote the course title on the board. “Black,” it read. Some students immediately questioned the language. Shouldn’t it be “African American”? Wasn’t “Black” outdated?
Cartwright let the conversation swirl. Then, after a long pause, he looked at me—the only Black student in the room—winked, and said, “We’ll stick with Black.”
It was the first time I felt fully seen in a college classroom.
Why Black Boys Leave
There’s a line people like to say about Black boys: “Not everyone is meant for college.” That’s a phrase you don’t hear from a Black immigrant parent.
The truth is, Black boys aren’t dropping out—they’re being pushed out.
Over the years, new barriers replaced the old ones. As education became more standardized, so did teacher licensing. Certification exams weeded out thousands of Black candidates. Between 1984 and 1989 alone, more than 21,000 Black teachers lost their jobs. More recently, reforms like charter school expansion and school choice have only deepened the erasure. These “innovations” often hired younger, less experienced (and whiter) educators and sidelined community-rooted Black teachers.
And it had ripple effects. It pushed out Black fathers, too fathers who once saw teachers they related to, who used to feel welcome in school spaces. Despite the myth of the absent Black father, CDC data shows that Black dads are among the most engaged in the country. But the school system wasn’t built for their presence, it was designed to manage their absence.
A Tradition Interrupted
But this story isn’t just about loss. It’s also about what’s still possible.
In Philadelphia, Sharif El-Mekki is leading the Center for Black Educator Development. He’s training a new generation of teachers in what he calls the Black Teaching Tradition—a way of teaching rooted in African history, civil rights movements, and community.
El-Mekki knows firsthand the power of culturally grounded education. He grew up attending a Pan-African school where “Black history” wasn’t a unit—it was the curriculum. In fifth grade, he took political science. His class was named after an African liberation movement. Guest speakers included Angela Davis and Sonia Sanchez. That education shaped him. “I embraced the idea that the purest form of activism was teaching young Black children well,” he says.
But El-Mekki also experienced the system’s failings. After surviving a shooting at age 20, he saw clearly how different his life was from the young man who shot him—same neighborhood, same age, but radically different outcomes. El-Mekki went on to teach and later became a principal. He founded the Fellowship: Black Male Educators for Social Justice and eventually launched the Center for Black Educator Development.
Today, his center is rebuilding the Black teacher pipeline starting as early as ninth grade. Students who take part in the program receive stipends, mentorship, and college support. “About 25 to 30% of our apprentices are young Black men,” he says. Compare that to the national average, only 1.3% of teachers are Black men—and you see why his work matters.
The Center also focuses on retention. Their model supports new teachers with culturally responsive training, coaching, and a $20,000 stipend in their fifth year. “Being a Black male teacher in America is like being a Black man in America,” El-Mekki says. “Same burdens. Same brilliance. Same resistance.”
Sometimes what students need most isn’t curriculum. It’s connection.
What If?
What if every Black boy had a Ms. Newton to introduce him to the history he came from?
What if he had a Mr. Reliford to watch his back?
What if he had a Dr. Cartwright to wink at him across the room?
What if he had a Sharif El-Mekki to show him the way?
We’ve spent decades blaming failing schools on poverty, on parenting, on the kids themselves. But the truth is, we removed the people who made those schools work.
The question isn’t why Black boys aren’t going to college.
The question is: What would it take to build an education system that actually wants them there?
Sources
“The Education Exodus,” Blackenomics chapter draft, 2024
Morgan Stanley’s Now, What’s Next? podcast — Future of Higher Ed
Leslie Fenwick, Jim Crow’s Pink Slip — https://www.hepg.org/hep-home/books/jim-crow-s-pink-slip
Center for Black Educator Development — https://www.thecenterblacked.org/
CDC Fatherhood Involvement Report — https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhsr/nhsr071.pdf
National Center for Education Statistics — https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2020/2020103.pdf
Pew Race & Social Connections Report — https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2015/06/11/chapter-5-race-and-social-connections-friends-family-and-neighborhoods/
Honored: Centoria Louden — https://www.honored.org/honoree/centoria-louden/
The Root: Black Male HBCU Enrollment — https://www.theroot.com/black-male-hbcu-enrollment-is-at-its-lowest-in-nearly-5-1851684594