Tell Them We Are Rising: The Story of Black Colleges and Universities

By: Edwin Asa Adjei, University of Ghana, Legon 

Tell Them We Are Rising: The Story of Black Colleges and Universities was one of the films shown by the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana, as part of this year’s lineup for black history month celebrations. Black colleges and universities have trained many leaders in almost all academic endeavours for more than 150 years. Tell Them We Are Rising, by Stanley Nelson, tells the story of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) in the US. It also connects this story to that of Pan-Africanism and African independence struggles during the 1950s.

Attempts by African Americans to gain formal education began during a period when they were slaves in the United States. There was fear that teaching blacks to read and write would make them rebel and impossible to keep as slaves. Laws were therefore enacted in the US forbidding the teaching of blacks to read and write. Despite the existence of these laws, some slaves learned to read and write in secret.

In the immediate aftermath of the American civil war, the first thing African Americans did was to seek education. Northern voluntary Christian organizations set up schools in the southern parts of the US with the goal of “civilizing” the blacks. By the late 1800s, there were eighty-six black colleges in the US. The growth of colleges and universities for blacks was not without challenges. In some areas, schools were destroyed and some lecturers were lynched for teaching African Americans, while some students also lost their lives for seeking education.

Among African Americans, there were those like Booker T. Washington who advocated for technical education for African Americans for a period before African Americans started degree programs. Others like W.E.B. Dubois accused Booker T. Washington of serving the interests of white Americans by refusing to let African Americans acquire enough education and hence deepening the perceived inferiority of blacks.

HBCUs have been in existence in the US for many years and have served as an avenue of formal education for many students who can share an educational space with other people with similar experiences. Despite the challenges, they have had over the years, they continue to be an avenue of socialization and formal education for many and this is the story that Tell Them We Are Rising highlights.

What caught my attention most in this film was the role HBCUs played in the independence of several African countries. HBCUs have historically been associated with grooming several civil rights activists in the US such as W.E.B. Dubois, Martin Luther King Jr., Jesse Jackson and John Lewis. I had never associated the independence struggle in Africa with HBCUs but through the film, I found out that Nnamdi Azikiwe, first president of Nigeria; Dr Kwame Nkrumah, first president of Ghana and one of the leading pan Africanists of his time in Africa; Hastings Kamuzu Banda, first president of Malawi; and John Chilembwe, a hero of the Malawian independence struggle, were all products of HBCUs. Daryl Poe, author of Kwame Nkrumah’s contribution to Pan-Africanism, notes that, “what the HBCUs did for the African liberation struggle was that they took the African intelligentsia and gave them a sense of historical conscience and expectation for equality”. It is therefore not surprising that especially in the early days of independence and the days leading to independence, alumni of HBCUs like Fisk, Howard, Lincoln and Tuskegee held positions of prominence in many African governments. So influential were HBCUs on the political elite of Africa that the Times of London published a story on thirty-five graduates of Lincoln University that held positions of prominence on the continent of Africa in the early 1950s.