Sometimes I’m ashamed to live in Florida. As a disclaimer for this story, I attended Fisk University, a private HBCU founded in 1866 in Nashville, Tennessee, like many of the first Black colleges. Fisk relied on multiple sources of funding. In our case, the Freedmen’s Bureau provided a former Union Army barracks to house the school and $30,000 in federal funds. The American Missionary Association, a Northern abolitionist organization backed by Congregationalist churches, sponsored the founders, supplied some of the teachers, and provided ongoing financial support.

Several HBCUs like Wilberforce University, Morris Brown, Edward Waters University, and Paul Quinn College, among others, were founded, governed, or operated by the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME). The Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament founded Xavier University, a Catholic order founded by Katherine Drexel, and later became the only Catholic HBCU in the United States.

Whatever the initial funding source, private HBCUs soon became responsible for their own fundraising. Fisk survived because of funds raised by the Jubilee Singers, who toured the U.S. and Europe, enough to save Fisk from bankruptcy and to erect the school’s first permanent structure, Jubilee Hall.

Fisk and all other private HBCUs have always had to convince a number of white donors to contribute to their mission. They have had to maintain accreditation by groups like the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges (SACSCOC), which accredits Fisk as well as the majority-white college across town, Vanderbilt University. Vanderbilt was founded seven years after Fisk, but with a $1 million donation from Cornelius Vanderbilt. The differential in amounts of contributions to the two schools has remained relatively consistent over time.

Private HBCUs, for various reasons, including fundraising, have needed to stay in the good graces of white people. One of those reasons is safety. Not everyone, especially before or right after the Civil War, wanted to see Black colleges survive, let alone thrive. The main reason they were supported was to maintain segregation and not require white colleges to admit Black students. I encourage readers to look up when the major universities in their state were first integrated. might it be much later than you imagine?

Most HBCUs initially had white presidents and mostly white board members. Fisk got its first Black president, Charles S. Johnson, in 1946. For the first 80 years of its existence, Fisk — like many AMA‑founded HBCUs — was governed by white presidents, largely to reassure white donors and white-controlled philanthropic boards.

White boards believed that white leadership reassured white donors, white presidents could navigate white political systems, and that Black leadership would provoke white hostility. This structure itself was a form of appeasement. To maintain white goodwill, Fisk leadership often marketed the university as a place where students were orderly, disciplined, non-threatening, academically elite, and morally conservative. This branding reassured white donors that Fisk was producing the kind of Black graduates they approved of — educated but not politically disruptive. For the most part, HBCUs operated under the direct control of white people, and later Black people, trying to anticipate what would be acceptable to white authorities.

When the Freedom Rides began in May 1961, many of the organizers — including Diane Nash, John Lewis, James Bevel, and Bernard Lafayette — were Fisk students or lived in Fisk housing. But the university’s leadership:

• Issued no endorsement
• Did not claim the students’ activism
• Avoided public statements supporting the Riders
• Emphasized that students were acting as private citizens, not representatives of Fisk

This was a deliberate strategy to protect the institution from white retaliation.

HBCUs that are state schools have a different dynamic. Many were formed as land grant schools along with several Predominantly White Institutions (PWIs). There were Land Grant Acts in 1862, 1890, and 1994, which, for the most part, appropriated stolen Native American lands and gave them to the states to fund colleges and Universities. The 1994 Act funded Tribal Colleges for the first time to a much lesser degree than the Black schools, which were supposed to get equal funding but never did.

The 1862 Land Grant Act required states to provide matching funds for the federal contribution, which they willingly agreed to. The same clause applied to the 1890 Act, but states often failed to match funds to the HBCUs established, seeking waivers or simply failing to do so. A third Land Grant Act in 1994 included Native Americans who had never been previously considered. For “Tribal Colleges,” there is no requirement for matching state funds, and they are ineligible to benefit from local property tax revenue. They are eligible for Tribal College Initiative Grants for capital improvements, limited to $250,000 annually and requiring a 5% match from the institution. Tribal Colleges receive a minuscule amount compared to the low amount HBCUs receive. If Tribal Colleges are being considered a replacement for stolen land, the government needs to do a far better job of funding them.

The Biggest Land Grab in American History | by William Spivey | Medium

For more than a century, states systematically underfunded their Black land‑grant universities — the institutions created under the Second Morrill Act of 1890 to provide agricultural and mechanical education to Black students barred from white colleges. While white land‑grant universities received steady, generous state appropriations, their Black counterparts were routinely shortchanged or denied matching funds altogether. The federal government repeatedly warned states that they were violating the law, but because enforcement was weak and political will was nonexistent, the pattern continued decade after decade. The result was a structural funding gap so large that it shaped everything from campus facilities to research capacity to faculty salaries.

By 2023, federal analysts calculated the cumulative shortfall: more than $12 billion owed to 18 Black land‑grant HBCUs. Some institutions — like Florida A&M, North Carolina A&T, and Prairie View A&M — were underfunded by hundreds of millions of dollars each. These weren’t abstract accounting errors; they were deliberate state choices that starved Black institutions while enriching their white counterparts. The legacy is visible today in infrastructure deficits, smaller endowments, and reduced research output — all traceable to money that should have been allocated by law but never arrived. The federal government has finally begun pressuring states to repay what they withheld, but the debt represents more than dollars. It is a century‑long record of discrimination embedded in the financial architecture of American higher education.

In addition to all the money lost, most state HBCUs, while they may have their own Board of Trustees, that board ultimately answers to a statewide Board of Regents, or in Florida’s case, a Board of Governors, which holds the real power. Florida’s Board of Governors exists to serve the governor, in our case, Ron DeSantis. Doing little to contradict his will. Florida A&M University (FAMU) is the only state-controlled HBCU in the State of Florida. There are approximately 9,300 students live in an environment where the governor wants to be the President of the United States, and the Florida legislature and all his appointees wish to appease him.

Governor DeSantis has convinced himself that the best way he can become President is to try to out-Trump Donald Trump and implement all his initiatives, like eliminating DEI and Black History Month. The governor and his administration like to remind the general populace that they control, that they can treat the largest HBCU in the state like their personal plantation, which brings me to the point of this story.

FAMU has its own College of Law, and, not surprisingly, students organized activities in honor of Black History Month. The school administration, in its fealty to Governor DeSantis, forbade the law school students from using the word “Black” in promoting Black History Month activities. In a statement no one dared sign. The school said:

“We support and have implemented the policy direction established by the Governor, the Legislature, and the Board of Governors as it relates to DEI, and consistent with related federal court rulings. Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University (FAMU) is committed to fostering a campus community that encourages the free exchange of ideas while ensuring an environment of mutual respect, safety, and awareness. The University recognizes that freedom of expression is fundamental to academic inquiry, personal development, and civic engagement.”

After national backlash, FAMU said that when “a staffer” indicated the students must not use the words “Black”, “women,” or “affirmative action,” it was a misinterpretation of Florida’s anti-DEI law. Interim Law School Dean Cecil Howard issued a new statement, making the following points:

• The restriction on using the word “Black” was a staff‑level error,
• No university policy prohibits the use of “Black,”
• The College of Law did not direct anyone to remove the term,
• The university remains committed to celebrating Black History Month.

Howard emphasized that the staff member misinterpreted Florida’s anti‑DEI law and acted without administrative approval.

Shortly afterward, FAMU President Marva Johnson stated that:

• The word “Black” is central to FAMU’s identity.
• The university “unequivocally confirms” that using “Black” or “Black History Month” does not violate state law.
• FAMU will continue to celebrate Black history and culture.

The university’s legal review concluded that:

• Using terms like “Black,” “women,” or “affirmative action” does not violate SB 266 or Board of Governors Regulation 9.016,
• There is no policy banning such language,
• The earlier restriction resulted from misinterpretation, not institutional guidance.

Though because they did not accept the initial bullshit from the school, the students of the College of Law were able to use the word Black. Why anyone thought they couldn’t is beyond me. But this isn’t an isolated incident. Florida State Representative Kevin Steele filed a bill (HB 113) that would have required all 40 public colleges and universities in Florida (including FAMU) to rename a campus roadway in honor of Charlie Kirk. Any school that refused would risk losing state funding. I could explain why making a campus of predominantly Black students walk or drive past a Charlie Kirk sign is troublesome, but either you already know, or you wouldn’t accept the reasoning.

The bullet was dodged this time regarding the use of the word 'Black' in Black History Month. But Florida students are always one whim away from the next attempt to take away Black history. FAMU’s library — like all public university libraries in Florida — has had to review collections for materials that could be interpreted as “advocating” DEI. They had to reclassify or relocate certain books, guides, or programming materials, and avoid purchasing new materials that could be construed as DEI‑related. This has created a chilling effect on acquisitions, especially in areas like race studies, gender studies, and social justice scholarship.

FAMU librarians have not publicly stated that books were banned, but they have acknowledged that purchasing decisions and programming now require legal review. Suppose Florida’s anti-DEI laws had applied to Fisk University. Would it have had to remove one of the three remaining copies in the world of the Black slave bible? One with chapters, verses, and the whole book of Revelations removed, to remove references to revolution.

What happened at FAMU wasn’t an isolated misstep or a rogue staffer’s confusion. It was the predictable outcome of a political environment designed to make people second‑guess whether acknowledging Blackness itself is now a punishable act. When laws are written vaguely and enforced aggressively, institutions don’t need to be told to censor themselves — they do it preemptively, out of fear of losing funding, accreditation, political favor, or jobs. That fear is the point. And at Florida’s only public HBCU, the consequences land with a particular sting: a school founded to educate the descendants of the enslaved found itself hesitating over whether it could even say the word “Black.”

The irony is that no law actually banned the term. The chilling effect did the work instead. And that’s the real story here — not a single email or a single month’s celebration, but the way power reshapes language long before it reshapes policy. If a place like FAMU can be pushed into momentary silence about its own identity, then the rest of us should be asking what other silences are being engineered, and who benefits when institutions built by Black struggle are pressured to forget the very people they were created to serve.