In Shelter in a Time of Storm, Jelani Favors provides an in-depth look at the role historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) played in providing a space for faculty and students to cultivate, plan, and execute protest actions against Jim Crow segregation between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. In this environment, faculty, staff, and administrators employed covert and overt methods to foster and sustain an environment conducive to African Americans’ organizational efforts to fight segregation while pressing for the full exercise of their citizenship rights. HBCUs from the late nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries educated and influenced scores of students by exposing them to and heightening their awareness of social and political issues affecting African Americans’ daily lives. These efforts bore tangible fruit decade after decade as some alumni became teachers in K-12 environments or college professors. While their work was not overtly evident in the nascent years of the civil rights movement, it became acutely visible during the 1950s and 1960s, when large-scale protests and campaigns were carried out.
Favors's work provides a chronological history of activism using seven institutions. He covers nearly 140 years of these institutions’ engagement and cultivation of race consciousness among students, weaving together a chronological narrative of institutional case studies that support his thesis. He presents a balanced view of specific student-involved events and of the struggles and tensions HBCU presidents and administrators faced as they were forced to choose between advancing the race and securing citizenship rights versus appeasing White government officials to ensure public funding that would minimally guarantee Black students had access to postsecondary education and training. His thesis is summed up as, “Black colleges became a significant progenitor of race men and women who tackled Jim Crow and white supremacy by utilizing various strategies that differed based on local or regional political conditions, the national current of Black militant thought, and the energy that flowed throughout their specific communitas” (p. 7). The schools examined include three private institutions—the Institute for Colored Youth, Tougaloo College, and Bennett College—and four public institutions—Alabama State University, Jackson State University, Southern University, and North Carolina Agricultural & Technical State University.
Favors's book title, Shelter in a Time of Storm, captures the main argument, which he builds around the fact that HBCUs were places of refuge and retreat in the late nineteenth and early to mid-twentieth centuries for their students and the local Black community. This period was characterized by little recognizable advancement of African Americans’ freedoms and rights as American citizens following Reconstruction, which made it possible for the emergence of the Ku Klux Klan and Jim Crow, and the retrenchment of rights granted by the Reconstruction Amendments. It was during this time that segregation and discrimination became ingrained and accepted practices in the South. Favors posits that local White leadership never envisioned HBCUs, mainly located in the South, to become radical institutions because of the social environment in the South. Favors notes, the “white power structure . . . saw Black education . . . as a formidable control mechanism that would pacify Black youths” (p. 3). Further, they expected the schools would teach “conformity, obedience, sobriety, piety, and the values of enterprise” (p. 3). Favors suggests that early activism was less visible as it drew on the “legacy of hidden education that African Americans mastered during slavery” (p. 11). The work of these institutions became visible mid-century because of the “unwritten second curriculum,” which he defines as “the bond between teacher and student, inspiring youths to develop a ‘linked sense of fate,’” akin to a mentor/mentee relationship (p. 5). The second curriculum, he asserts, “formed the heartbeat of the Black College communitas,” spreading race consciousness among the students (pp. 7, 11). The development of race consciousness among college students dovetailed with the larger Black community's growing impatience with continued oppression and the slow pace of change. It was in this environment that HBCUs became “staging grounds” for the activities that brought changes for America's Black citizens. Favors argues that the “political boldness” exhibited in southern Black communities beginning in the 1940s and throughout the civil rights movement germinated on HBCU campuses (p. 11). His work reveals that HBCUs were far from the passive and docile institutions many believed them to be—they were important spaces “for sheltering budding activists, inculcating a second curriculum of racial consciousness, and providing the communitas necessary to generate the sense of solidarity and connections sufficient to launch a full-frontal assault on white supremacy” (p. 11).
Favors uses communitas as the conceptual framework for Shelter in a Time of Storm, explaining its deployment at each institution. Borrowing the term from anthropologist Victor Turner, his use of the word describes the space that was necessary for HBCUs to offer their students “shelter from the worst elements of a white supremacist society” intent on “undermin[ing], overlook[ing], and render[ing] impotent the intellectual capacity of Black youths” (p. 5). By employing communitas in this way, Favors casts it as the one essential element the African American community needed to organize itself and to develop and launch its strategy to advocate for and demonstrate the exigent need for social change in the South. Favors's work clearly shows that HBCU students, faculty, and administrators contributed to African Americans’ freedom struggle long before the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s.
To craft this work, Favors consulted nearly two dozen manuscript collections, conducted eighteen oral history interviews, and accessed more than a dozen conducted by others related to the civil rights movement. In addition, Favors combed HBCU campus-based newspapers and the Black press to craft and tell a story of HBCU students’ contributions to African Americans’ freedom struggle in the United States. This is significant given that the perspectives reflected in these sources reveal the thoughts and viewpoints of those living within the constricted confines of a Jim Crow South.
American society sought to crush the hopes and aspirations of its African American citizens. The African American community has vehemently fought this in many ways for more than a century. Favors's work shows how college students at HBCUs contributed to African Americans’ freedom struggle over almost a century and a half, beginning before the Civil War and lasting through the modern civil rights movement and into the mid-1970s. I believe Favors's work begins to scratch the surface of HBCUs and their students’ contributions to American history. His work calls for education historians and historians of the African American experience to look more closely at the institutions created in the wake of the Civil War that sheltered and educated generations of African Americans seeking, as did their ancestors, an education and their right to be participatory citizens of the American republic. There are stories that remain untold about these unique institutions. This work should inspire others to more fully uncover the rich history of these institutions and their students’ contributions to our shared American history and African Americans’ freedom struggle in the United States.
