The Trump administration’s cuts to education stand to impact Black students most. A forum held at the Pennsylvania Convention Center brought Black educators together to strategize.
Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc. convened its first day of its 98th General Convention l 119th Anniversary Comvention on Wednesday, which included opening plenary, and business sessions, regional caucuses, and its public program panel, “Advocacy in Education: Empowering Black Men first College and Beyond,” as well as Alpha Award of Merit and Alpha Award of Honor presentations, followed by a lively welcome reception at the Pennsylvania Convention Center in Philadelphia, PA.
Photo courtesy: Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity Inc.
By Chris Murray
For the Philadelphia Sunday SUN
On Tuesday, the Supreme Court gave President Donald J. Trump permission to lay off most of the Department of Education, a move that will have an impact on urban school districts with majority minority populations like Philadelphia’s.
A forum held Wednesday night at the Pennsylvania Convention Center gathered a group of the nation’s top African Americans for a strategy session on ways to counteract the harm.
As part of the group’s 98th General Convention, Alpha Phi Alpha held the forum: “Advocacy in Education: Empowering Black Men for College and Beyond” with the premise of uniting its fellow Divine Nine members and other Black institutions to find ways to educate Black students at a time when assistance from federal or state governments is in short supply.
The time to start working on this is now, said Dr. Nina L. Gilbert, director of the College for Excellence in Education at Morehouse College in Atlanta.
“In this time where education is under attack as we understood in the public education sector, history is being redefined, where science is being ignored, where civics is being dismantled, it is our time now to create something new,” she said. “How can we find new ways to prepare educators, new ways to educate our students, and not rely on the systems of oppression that have been built to continue to oppress us?”
Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc. General President Brother Lucien J. Metellus, Jr. with Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker.
Photo courtesy: Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity Inc.
Moderated by journalist and author Jeff Johnson, the panel also included Rutgers University President William Tate, Walter M. Kimbrough, interim president of Talladega College in Alabama, and Everett B. Ward, 35th general president of Alpha Phi Alpha and former president of St. Augustine University in Raleigh, N.C.
During the forum, the educators presented their vision about the role that Black fraternities and sororities, along with the Black church and other institutions, will play in the education of African Americans in light of current events, and also took questions from the audience.
“We are looking at a Department of Education that’s closed,” Johnson said to the panelists. “States that are now going to be responsible for distributing billions of dollars, but none of them have the money. We’re going to wait to see where things are going to fall, or we’re going to build as we never have before.”
Strategies ranged from establishing partnerships with both the public and private sectors to the church and parents’ groups coming together to support Black teachers and students.
In his presentation, Ward discussed the need for African American elected officials to start thinking “outside the box” for new ways to advance the cause of education for African American students and teachers.
To illustrate this idea, he used the example of Birmingham, Alabama Mayor Randall Woodfin. Woodfin, who was a member of the city’s school board before becoming mayor, decided to try and get buy-in from stakeholders — including the business community and African American community leaders — to make education a priority.
“What (Woodfin) did was develop a public and private partnership with business leaders that said to the business community, as well as our community and others, that ‘the value of our city that the value of upward mobility, the value of intellectual development was an interest that included everyone,” Ward said.
Alpha Steppers Photo courtesy: Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity Inc.
Ward said that Mayor Woodfin partnered with the Alabama Power and Light Company to develop “The Birmingham Promise,” which enabled students to attend any community college or university in the state of Alabama tuition-free, even if they don’t have a defined grade-point average or score on a standardized test like the SAT.
Another example of a community partnership between government leaders and the African-American community that Ward pointed took place in Oklahoma City in 2021 when the Alpha Community Foundation and the Beta Eta Lambda chapter of Alpha Phi Alpha bought and transformed an abandoned elementary school into a community center that houses a community room, a music studio, office spaces, a game room for young people and offers classes in exercise and dance.
Ward reminded the audience that the Black community has always strived for education even at times when the education system has been blatantly unfair, especially after the 1896 Plessy vs. Ferguson Supreme Court decision that upheld segregation, saying that facilities (including schools) can be separate but equal.
“But boy, wasn’t it great where we could go to school and our churches served as substitute school and community centers had tutorial programs,” Ward said. “We’ve got to go back to those days. …We’ve got to be more entrepreneurial.”
There was a consensus among the panelists that with the Trump administration’s assault on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs that helped Black college students attend predominantly white institutions will no longer be there and that African Americans are on their own.
The Rev. William J. Barber speaking at the convention.
Photo courtesy: Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity Inc.
Walter Kimbrough said Black fraternities and sororities at PWIs are in danger because their presence might be considered an example of the DEI initiatives that the Trump administration is seeking to eliminate.
“I’m here to tell you have chapters (at PWIs), they might go away,” Kimbrough said. “That’s where we are right now, because you can’t have your minority recruiters. You can’t do certain things that we normally relied on (PWIs) to do because you have these outside groups that are putting pressure to say, ‘no is everybody is equal now. It’s all good now. You don’t have to do that for anybody.’”
Kimbrough said that the African American organizations, business leaders, and church leaders need to come up with ways to raise money to help Black students to have an opportunity to not only earn bachelor’s degrees, but also to attend graduate school, medical school, and law school.
“Our organizations can do that kind of work, because if we don’t do that kind of work, you’re going to see a significant drop-off in people who look like this room going to college, going to graduate and professional school,” Kimbrough said. “We’ve got to come up with systems to fund our students to be able to be in these programs to go to school.”
Tate, who was also the president of Louisiana State University, said the best approach to ensuring that African Americans are included is not to use the language of DEI. He said when he was the president at LSU, he created a mentoring program that was similar to the Rutgers Future Scholars Program in which followed students from the time they were in the seventh grade through graduate school.
“We raised that money from people who don’t look like us because they were committed to answering the question of who’s not getting access to this institution and why?” Tate said. “You see, there are ways to do this in the most Southern state in the United States of America.
You have to have the right language. If you have the right language, you can have the right program.”
The common denominator that carried this forum is that even with the gutting of the Department of Education and other programs that have aided the African American community in the past, there is the confidence that the Black community will weather the storm of an uncertain present and future when it comes to education.
“I’m excited because this is our opportunity to innovate, to disrupt, because no one’s coming to save us — but we’ve never been able to rely on formal institutions to ensure that we educate properly,” Gilbert said. “So, there is a blueprint. There is collective action and things we can do individually, independently. (Black people) had far fewer sources than we have now, so with the tools and resources, this is the time we can innovate, disrupt, and work to create the realities we want to see for our children.”
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