If you recall, Black folks on social media spent much of this summer fiercely debating two of the gravest threats to the future of HBCUs: young women wearing bonnets at Tuskegee University and Howard University students committing the high crime of not having enough money to enroll.
Apparently, those threats were more urgent than a 159-year-old Black university in Raleigh, North Carolina, founded to educate formerly enslaved people, losing its accreditation, drowning in debt, filing for bankruptcy and quietly ceasing to function as a university.
Yes, I’m talking about Saint Augustine’s University, which trained newly freed Black folk during Reconstruction, created North Carolina’s first Black nursing school, operated St. Agnes Hospital during segregation so Black patients could receive professional medical care, educated the feminist scholar Anna Julia Cooper, and produced more than 40 Olympians.
While folks were busy policing bonnets and student bank accounts, on August 20, the university, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy back in April with $74 million in debt, told a bankruptcy court that it would no longer offer classes, certificate programs, or other educational programming this fall. The school failed to retain accreditation, it lost access to federal financial aid, and it suspended plans to generate revenue through online programs.
Though the bankruptcy judge said Saint Augustine’s is “essentially closed,” the university has not formally said it is permanently closed and its leaders say they plan to emerge from bankruptcy and rebuild.
And this is fucking sad, Y’all. SAD!
Because Saint Augustine’s is among three dozen present-day HBCUs, an entire generation of Black institutions, that were founded during that brief window after slavery where this country witnessed the educational infrastructure of Black freedom being built. Saint Augustine’s survived Reconstruction, and like Tuskegee and Howard, Jim Crow, racial terrorism, the Great Depression, two world wars, and generations of deliberate white disinvestment only to find itself fighting for its life under the Trump regime’s white nationalist assault on higher ed.
*But where is the national alarm? *
*Where is all the viral social media outrage? *
*Where are the demands that that elected officials, philanthropists, corporations, alumni and Black institutions assemble an emergency rescue effort? *
*Hello, hello, HELLLLL-OOOO? *
Ohh, but we saw lots of social-media energy devoting to dragging the hell out of bonnets and broke students and news about Howard offering buyouts to faculty and staff. Folks ate that up because they’re always so eager to call HBCUs raggedy, corrupt and incompetent.
Meanwhile, an actual HBCU is quietly dying.
And just watch, this fall you’re gonna see folks online praising HBCUs as cultural symbols. We’ll be deluged with videos showcasing homecomings, marching bands, Greek life, celebrity alumni, and school pride. As if these schools are not facing an urgent crisis and are at risk of disappearing. I guess folks think nostalgia can rebuild them.
Saint Augustine’s troubles did not begin with Donald Trump’s first or second racist presidency. So we can’t lie about that. Like more than 300 other colleges and universities, Saint Augustine’s had been suffering from years of declining enrollment, debt, governance failures, unpaid employees and accreditation problems. Under Trump’s first president, 375 colleges closed in just three academic years, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics. So far, under his current term, at least 16 colleges or campuses announced closure in 2025 and that number is continuing to rise. I was not able to find an authoritative final federal total just yet.
Most of these closures were for-profit schools, but 64 were private nonprofits and two were public institutions, and since since 2020, dozens more public and private nonprofit colleges have closed, merged or announced plans to close.
Now, I’m not out here trying to argue that the Orange Menace is personally responsible for causing every closure. Many of these institutions were already weak and had been suffering from falling enrollments, debt, COVID losses and years of poor governance.
But the Trump regime’s assault on federal research funding, student aid, DEI, international enrollment and the Department of Education is hitting schools and especially small,** **tuition-dependent HBCUs like Saint Augustine’s especially hard. HBCUs, due to chronic historical disinvestment, have far less financial insulation than wealthy predominantly white institutions like say a Harvard which can lose grants, fight the federal government in court and draw upon billions in assets. Small HBCUs operate with little cash and modest endowments, and little political protection so they may not survive a delayed federal payment, enrollment declines or even one disastrous audit.
So don’t look at what’s happening at Saint Augustine’s either as one unfortunate campus or an isolated embarrassment. This is a serious warning that we need to heed. And if we don’t, we will watch other HBCUs close their doors as during this national higher-education contraction.
And what’s especially scary is that if more HBCUs fall, the consequences could decimate the Black middle class which was created and is replenished by these institutions. Research shows that nearly 70% of HBCU students earn at least a middle-class income. Collectively, these institutions generate $16.5 billion in annual economic impact, they support more than 136,000 jobs, and more than 51,000 students who graduated from HBCUs in 2021 are projected to earn $146 billion over their working lives. This is $53 billion more than they would have earned had they not graduated from these schools.
The damage will be inherited by generations. We’re gonna see fewer Black homeowners, business owners, doctors, journalists, alumni and donors who are positioned to finance the next generation’s education. The Trump regime and its evil architects don’t have to stand behind a podium and declare that they are gonna destroy the Black middle class. All they have to do is dismantle the institutions that reproduce it and starve these schools of the economic resources they need to operate.
I hope that Saint Augustine’s can emerge from bankruptcy and rebuild. In the meantime, folks need to stop with all these anti-Black HBCU memes, the viral posts that relentlessly portray these schools as embarrassing, dysfunctional, incompetent, corrupt, and undeserving. Because if y’all keep doing this shit and aiming all this scrutiny at individual schools instead of upward at the racist capitalist overlords destroying every damn thing, this more closures will be framed as some kind of natural Darwinian consequence of Black low-IQ boolshit rather than the culmination of historic underfunding, unequal endowments, predatory financing and present-day political assaults.
If Black social media can mobilize overnight over some damn bonnet and produce this kind of viral humiliation, then surely we can mobilize around the survival of Black institutions,* right*? Because if we don’t, we will watch another HBCU quietly die, and and more Black futures die with it. And that silence and complicity will be treason against the ancestors who held such high hopes that the education of our people would prove to be a corrective genius to all that this racist system tried to destroy.
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THIS CONTENT IS WRITTEN IN THE AUTHOR’S PERSONAL CAPACITY. ANY OPINIONS EXPRESSED ARE THE AUTHOR’S OWN AND SHOULD NOT BE ATTRIBUTED TO HOWARD UNIVERSITY OR MORGAN STATE UNIVERSITY.
