an entire people. Ida B. Wells turned evidence, investigative rigor, and organized resistance against racial terror. Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune transformed education, political strategy, and institution-building into enduring public power. Different as their work was, each rejected the proposition that Black advancement meant merely becoming more successful within an unequal order. Education had to enlarge Black capacity to expose injustice, exercise power, build institutions, and create something better. That distinction remains urgent because material achievement alone has never eliminated the structures Black people are being prepared to navigate. HBCUs awarded nearly 49,000 degrees during the 2021–22 academic year, yet Black graduates continue to carry disproportionate student debt. And in 2025, Black women—many of them educated, experienced, and employed in public service—ended the year with 113,000 fewer jobs. These women did not suddenly become less prepared, less disciplined, or less professional. Their losses reveal the limits of any theory of Black advancement that assigns individuals the burden of overcoming structural inequality through achievement and proper comportment. Which is why our fixation on student dress and deportment deserves far more scrutiny than we usually give it.
not merely clothing. Black students were being taught how to remain legible, grateful, and sufficiently unthreatening to the white people whose money helped sustain their institution. More than a century later, the terms have changed, but the question has not disappeared. Tuskegee University recently announced restrictions involving bonnets, durags, bedroom shoes, and expectations for business attire. Hampton University has long defended dress and appearance standards as part of its “Education for Life.” Many alumni embrace such policies as evidence of what makes HBCUs exceptional. I understand the appeal because I once made that case myself. My position was too small. I mistook instruction in navigating white expectations for a sufficient theory of Black education. The lesson is not that clothing never matters. It plainly can. The lesson is that standards are never politically neutral. We must ask who establishes them, whose comfort they secure, what behavior they reward, and toward what conception of Black advancement they point. Student choices are not meaningless. Discernment, self-command, discipline, and an understanding of professional context remain valuable. But their influence on an institution’s future is small compared with the power exercised from the boardroom table to the president’s office and lived through administrators, faculty, staff, and students. A student’s clothing may shape a passing perception. Trustees determine governance, accountability, presidential selection, and institutional direction. Presidents establish priorities and culture. Administrators control policy and enforcement. Faculty and staff determine whether proclaimed values
That fixation is hardly new.
become lived reality. Failed leadership can compromise accreditation, finances, academic freedom, employee well-being, student safety, and public trust for generations. Any serious definition of HBCU excellence must scrutinize those with the greatest power at least as rigorously as it regulates those with the least.
In the late nineteenth century, Meharry medical student Charles Victor Roman recalled that he and his classmates attempted to change their “hats and coats.” The class was summoned to chapel, where white President John Braden delivered an impassioned lecture on modesty, common sense, and economy—and warned, among other things, that white benefactors might resent seeing students dressed better than they were. The issue was
Black respectability turns toxic when we
1 8 | HBCU TIMES FALL ISSUE 2026
Powered by FlippingBook