In 1969, as the Civil Rights Movement transitioned from street protest to institutional policy, leaders from the nation’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities gathered to address a crisis that desegregation had made worse rather than better. The Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 had declared separate educational facilities inherently unequal — but the federal government’s implementation of desegregation had systematically defunded and threatened to close the very institutions Black Americans had built to educate themselves when white institutions refused them. To defend those institutions and advocate for their survival, representatives from HBCUs founded the National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education — NAFEO. It remains the only national organization representing the presidents, chancellors, and students of all HBCUs, historically Black community colleges, and predominantly Black institutions.
The paradox NAFEO was founded to address was profound. Desegregation meant that Black students could now attend previously white institutions — but it also meant that state governments began reducing funding for HBCUs on the grounds that separate Black institutions were no longer necessary. This logic ignored two realities. First, HBCUs were not created because Black people preferred segregation — they were created because white institutions refused Black students. Second, even after formal desegregation, HBCUs continued to serve the students white institutions were not serving — first-generation college students, students from lower-income families, students who needed the mentorship and community that an HBCU campus provided in ways that predominantly white institutions did not. Defunding HBCUs in the name of integration was not progress. It was the removal of infrastructure under the cover of equality.
NAFEO’s advocacy over five decades has been consequential. It secured Title III of the Higher Education Act — the federal funding stream specifically designated for HBCUs and other minority-serving institutions. It has fought against accreditation threats that have targeted HBCUs disproportionately. It has advocated for federal research funding, for HBCU inclusion in federal contracting, and for the preservation of HBCU land-grant status. When presidential administrations have proposed budget cuts to HBCU funding — as has happened repeatedly across both parties — NAFEO has been the organization that mobilized HBCU presidents, alumni, and students to respond. Its annual conference brings together HBCU leadership with federal policymakers, corporate partners, and philanthropic organizations to address the persistent funding gap between HBCUs and predominantly white institutions.
That funding gap remains substantial. The average HBCU endowment is a fraction of comparable predominantly white institutions. Many HBCUs were established in states that deliberately underfunded them during the Jim Crow era — and federal courts have found, in multiple cases, that those states have never fully remedied that historical underfunding. Mississippi, Maryland, and other states have faced federal lawsuits and consent decrees requiring them to increase HBCU funding to address documented histories of inequitable state support. The debt these states owe to their HBCUs — and to the generations of Black students who received inferior resources while paying the same tuition — is not hypothetical. It has been adjudicated in federal court. The remedies remain incomplete.
Fayetteville State University is a NAFEO member institution. Its survival and growth — from seven men pooling their money in 1867 to a university of more than 6,000 students today — represents exactly what NAFEO exists to protect. The organization’s founding principle is unchanged from 1969: that equal opportunity in higher education is not achieved by removing the institutions that served those who were excluded, but by ensuring those institutions have the resources to serve future generations with the excellence their founders intended.