Books
Shelter in a Time of storm
For generations, historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) have been essential institutions for the African American community. Their nurturing environments not only provided educational advancement but also catalyzed the Black freedom struggle, forever altering the political destiny of the United States. In this book, Jelani M. Favors offers a history of HBCUs from the 1837 founding of Cheyney State University to the present, told through the lens of how they fostered student activism.
What People Are Saying
“A welcome addition to the history of higher education and the contemporary scholarship on student activism, social movements, and leadership. . . . A powerful reminder that black colleges were not just a consequence of de jure segregation. They have been, and continue to be, a symbolic space that affirms the humanity and agency of black youth.”
— Academe
“A tour de force. . . . By recovering the legacy of HBCUs in fostering generations of leadership and activism, Shelter in a Time of Storm offers a bold vision of the role that black colleges can still play for today’s generation of college students and the issues they—and the rest of American society—currently face.”
—American Historical Review
“Favors . . . details the integral role of black colleges in nurturing ‘communitas’ and the ‘unwritten second curriculum’ . . . which spearheaded activism among African Americans from the nadir of race relations (after Reconstruction) to the present day . . . Favors describes the second curriculum and communitas not as a subversive plot against American democracy, but instead as a beacon of hope for all people. Given recent spates of racial unrest across the nation and on college campuses, this book delivers a counternarrative that is at once historic and prescient.”
— Choice
“Poignant. . . . Delves deeply into issues of student activism at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and sets out to write a more complex history of Black colleges.”