During the address, UNCF president and CEO Dr. Michael L. Lomax called on federal policymakers to make significant investments in HBCU infrastructure and innovation, reform financial aid and evaluate regional accreditors’ treatment of HBCUs. UNCF also released its new Congressional Honor Roll, a list that currently recognizes 59 members of Congress who go above and beyond in their policymaking and support for HBCU success.
Dr. Michael L. Lomax
“The state of our HBCUs is resilient,” Lomax said. “In spite of obstacles and barriers, assaults and attacks, underinvestment and devaluation … they persist.”
Lomax noted that while HBCUs “punch above their weight,” they are often compared with some of the oldest and most well-resourced institutions in higher education. It would be 201 years after Harvard University’s founding in 1636 that the first HBCU, Cheyney University, would be established, and another 30 years before more colleges would rise to educate Black citizens, he said.
“That is 250 years of systemic exclusion of Black people from education,” Lomax said, noting that educational inequality is a mirror image of the wealth gap in American society at large. “We cannot be complacent when so much is needed” to catch up to older institutions.
But “make no mistake, our aspirations are to lead not to follow,” Lomax urged.
