WORKING THROUGH THE CHALLENGES: STRUGGLE AND RESILIENCE WITHIN THE HISTORICALLY BLACK LAND GRANT INSTITUTIONS

In 1890 the Morrill-McComas Act provided for the establishment of segregated land grant colleges within the sixteen southern and border states practicing both de jure and de facto racial discrimination. This article reviews the significant role played by the legacies of racial discrimination, funding inequities and the model of institution building that made teacher and resident education the focal mission of the historically black land grant institutions, in shaping the current struggles and challenges faced by the institutions. Inadequate research budgets and inadequate resources for serving the needs of African American farmers suffering devastating losses of land and livelihood are two significant challenges tied to the legacy of racial discrimination. In turn historically black land grant institutions have developed distinctive strengths that are increasingly being called upon to serve the challenges confronting communities in the rural South.

The Importance of Legacy

The Morrill-Wade Act of 1862 provided for the creation of land grant colleges that would offer an education to a broad range of U.S. citizens primarily involved in agriculture and industrial work. It was not until 1890, however, with the passage of the second land grant act, the Morrill-McComas Act, that provisions were made for this kind of education for African Americans. Thus the designations 1862 or historically white land grant institutions and 1890 or historically black land grant institutions respectively.

The Morrill-McComas Act of 1890 was passed in an era of stark disenfranchisement, with African American gains in land ownership, education and political power having been effectively undone by the Compromise of 1877. The Compromise sealed the election of President Rutherford B. Hayes in exchange for the removal of northern troops from the South. Since the presence of northern troops offered protection for the fragile social, economic and political gains of newly liberated African Americans their removal spelled the reversal of support for African Americans to become full fledged American citizens (Du Bois, 1967). This would ultimately result in the legacy of discriminatory policies and practices that have resulted in the distinctive disadvantages faced by African Americans up through the 21st century.

The implementation of the 1890 land grant act, clearly reflected the spirit of the Compromise of 1877. The legislation was in fact enacted to respond to pressure by agricultural scientists and agricultural interest lobbies for appropriations to cover the costs of residential instruction for the more complete endowment and maintenance of the white land grant institutions (Marbury, 1979). Only secondarily did it provide for the creation of separate land grant institutions for African Americans. The ambiguous intent of the legislation is most notably reflected in the funding inequities that have characterized black land grant operations from the very beginning.

Funding Inequities

The 1890 legislation brought into existence segregated land grant institutions for African Americans within the 16 southern and border states practicing both de jure and de facto racial discrimination. The table lists black land grant institutions and their dates of establishment. Although the 1890 institutions were established in principle to accomplish the tripartite mission of research, teaching, and extension that the 1862 historically white land grant institutions had been established to accomplish, the system of racial discrimination that prevailed in the South after Reconstruction deprived them of the resources necessary to do so.

This deprivation resulted in a very different trajectory of development for these institutions. For instance, federal formula funding under the Hatch Act of 1887 allowed white land grant institutions to establish State Agricultural Experiment Stations (SAESs). This helped those institutions to develop the research capabilities necessary to be in the vanguard of the scientific revolution in American agriculture. Black land grant institutions were denied access to Hatch funds for research, and federal funding was restricted to supporting teacher training and resident education within these institutions (Mayberry, 1991).

Hatch funding inequities between black and white land grant institutions were not addressed by the federal government until the late 1960s. Only one institution Prairie View A&M in Texas received Hatch monies prior to 1971. In addition to Alabama which provided money for the conduct of agricultural research at Tuskegee, three out of the seventeen states designating separate land grant institutions for African Americans provided state research monies prior to 1971. These were Georgia, Texas and Virginia. Black land grant institutions with monies from private sources to support research prior to the early seventies included Florida A&M University, North Carolina A&T University and Tennessee State University. It was only with the provision of Cooperative State Research Service (CSRS - now called CSREES) funds, a percentage of which were ear-marked specifically for research at black land grant institutions in 1966-67 that black land grant institutions began receiving ongoing support for their research programs (Mayberry, 1991).

Focus on Teaching

Many of the federal mandates applied to land grant institutions subsequent to the 1890 legislation both supported and helped to elaborate the focus on teacher training and resident education within the black land grant institutions. However, of the land grant acts passed between 1900 and 1935 (i.e. Purnell, Smith-lever, Bankhead-Jones, Nelson, etc.) only the Nelson amendment of 1907 and the Bankhead-Jones Act of 1935 provided for the equitable distribution of funds to black land grant institutions. Both acts allocated funds specifically for the instruction of teachers of agriculture, the mechanic arts and home economics.

The focus on teacher training and resident education within black land grant institutions was fueled by two different but interrelated forces. One was the poor educational environment in the South generally and for African Americans in particular. The majority of the land grant institutions were located in areas where the public schools were either very poor or nonexistent. As a result, the majority of students attending black land grant institutions, up until the early years of the late 20th century, were at the primary and secondary levels. It was not until the late 1920s that the number of college students exceeded the high school and grade school enrollments. The second force that conditioned the focus on teacher training and resident education within black land grant institutions was the belief that came to prevail in the South during the post-Reconstruction period that education for African Americans should be restricted to practical, vocational training involving extensive, manual labor experiences (Anderson, 1988). These kinds of programs were established at the Hampton Normal School (now Hampton University) by Samuel Chapman Armstrong in 1868 and later at Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University) by Armstrong's student Booker T. Washington in 1881. Although neither of these schools was an official land grant institu-tion, they were the models that the black land grant institutions subsequently attempted to emulate.

Teaching and teacher training became essential activities within black institutions. Teachers such as Washington were seen as key to disseminating ideas about the specific form that education should take for African Americans and they could, in turn reproduce these ideas through the design of their institutions and the activities of their students. Acceptance of this form of education helped to restrict African American social mobility within the South and served to mold an underclass that could be exploited to rebuild the cotton South after the war (Anderson, 1988; Bullock, 1967; Bond, 1966). Although there was great diversity among the black land grant institutions, from their beginnings they had in common the heritage of the practical-vocational orientation to education and consistently inadequate funding from state, federal, and private sources for research.

Pioneers in Extension

Extension activities were not supported for black land grant institutions by the Smith-Lever Act of 1914, which created the Cooperative Agricultural Extension Service, although the idea of a "movable school of agriculture" to reach out to farmers originated at Tuskegee Institute with Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver. The "Jesup Agricultural Wagon for Better Farming"; as the Washington-Carver concept came to be called, began operation in 1906, eight years before the Smith-Lever Act put the Extension Service in place. Carver and Washington conceived the idea for the Jesup Wagon because both realized that it would be difficult to reach the many isolated farmers living in the Alabama countryside by trying to get them to attend the Institute for instruction and support. Carver worked to create a horse drawn wagon to carry plows, planters, seed varieties, sample fertilizers, and equipment to make butter and cheese. These items could be used by a faculty member from Tuskegee to give lectures and demonstrations (Mayberry, 1991).

Black land grant institutions were not recognized or supported with Smith-Lever funds until the Food and Agriculture Act of 1977 was enacted. However, beginning in 1917 Seaman Knapp of the Federal Extension Service endorsed hiring "Negro farm agents" and "Negro home demonstration agents" to work in the counties with large black populations. From this period on, a dual system of extension administration and implementation was enforced. Black agents were headquartered at the black land grant institutions and were supervised by a "Negro" state "leader"; "director", or "district agent", who in turn was accountable to the white state director for the supervision of "Negro" agents in his charge. This structure of administration and the pattern of funding distribution that went along with it have had dramatic consequences for how black land grant institutions have responded to one of their primary constituencies over the years, the small scale, limited resource farmers of the Black Belt and Delta South (Schor, 1982).

African American Land Loss

Reaching out to small scale, limited resource farmers has been a primary mandate of the black land grant institutions since their inception. However, they have faced considerable challenges in helping black farmers, in particular, to even retain ownership of their land. Trends in African American land loss are quite disturbing. The number of African American farms peaked in 1920 at 926,000 and remained at about 800,000 until 1935. With the exception of the period between 1940-50 the number of African American farm operations have declined dramatically. The figure graphs the decline in black and white farm operations from 1910 to 1990. Black operated farms have decreased at a faster rate than white operated farms. This was the case regardless of farm size. The number of black farms decreased at a higher rate in every state, in every region for farms with less than $10,000 in sales. This represented the majority of farms. For farms with sales over $10,000 the pattern was very similar except for Oklahoma, Texas and West Virginia. It is notable that these states border the former slave South (Wood and Gilbert, 1998).

If current trends in black farm loss continue it is predicted that by the year 2010 there will no longer be African American farm operations in existence. The impact of patterns of institutional and policy discrimination is instructive in this regard.

In February 1997 the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Secretary Dan Glickman issued an official report documenting the systematic ways in which African Americans had sustained losses of their farms, as a result of the practices of the Farmer's Home Administration (FmHA) (Civil Rights Action Team, 1997). In April, 1997 hundreds of African American farmers marched on Washington and testified before the Congressional Black Caucus about the systematic practices used by local FmHA administrations and local farmers' committees to prevent them from getting loans, thus facilitating foreclosure of their operations.

Testimonies before the Congressional Black Caucus echoed concerns expressed in 1937, by the interracial Tenant and Farmers' Union, which criticized the USDA's programs for discriminatory practices that disadvantaged poor, small and black farmers. Between 1937 and the present, numerous organizations have been mobilized to give voice to these concerns and to challenge the USDA, in the form of class action lawsuits. Central among these voices consistently have been those of the Presidents of the black land grant institutions.

Calls for action on the part of black land grant Presidents have come in the form of requests for mandates to assure state funding of their research and extension programs in tandem with federal funding so that they can more effectively work with farmers on alternative crops, cultural practices, marketing and financial management and budgeting that will help them in retaining their land. A number of the institutions (e.g., University Arkansas Pine Bluff, University Maryland-Eastern Shore) have been involved in programs that have combined these approaches in working with farmers to improve farming practices and production and in negotiating loan arrangements with the FmHA and other lenders.

Recent research indicates that there are signs, of re-entry, of significant numbers of African Americans into farming (Wood and Gilbert, 1998). This group is made up of people who have not been defined as "farmers" by the Census, however, they still own land and want to farm again. These farmers on average are younger and better educated, than the traditional African American farmers, but still are very much in need of federal loans from the FmHA to finance farm operations, in order to survive. If equipped with the necessary resources and networks black land grant institutions could prove an important source of support for these new farmers.

The Impacts of Desegregation

With the desegregation mandate of 1954, black land grant extension programs were either eliminated or absorbed uncomfortably into white land grant programs (Schor, 1983). Teaching programs in the black land grant institutions received increased federal support. With white institutions more accessible to African Americans, enrollments at black institutions, especially in agriculture, began to decline. A greater number of African American agricultural students received training as researchers within white institutions instead of being restricted to being trained as teachers.

Concerns about strengthening black land grant research capabilities to bring them to parity with agriculture programs at white land grant institutions were at the center of proposals consistently made to the U.S. Department of Agriculture over the years by the 1890 President's Council. By 1967 the federal government had conceded that some support was in order.

Between 1967 and 1971, black land grant institutions received an annual allocation of $283,000, or an average allocation per institution of $17,687.50, through the Cooperative State Research Service under Public Law 89-106. As discrete research grants, each grant was treated individually, and a system of yearly compliance was required for subsequent funding. Essentially, the allocations funded under Public Law 89-106 provided just enough money to whet the appetites of many black land grant research directors, but did not provide enough to develop substantial research programs (Trueheart, 1979).

By 1972 the yearly allocation to black land grant institutions had risen to $8,883,000. By 1977, the 1890 institutions had lobbied successfully for the provision of formula funds through the 1977 Farm Bill, Public Law 95-113, Section 1445 (also known as the Evans-Allen amendment or the Hatch Act for the black land grant institutions). It provided a formula fund for the annual authorization of research moneys to black land grant institutions. Evans-Allen funds are provided at an annual amount equal to 15 percent of federal funds provided to white land grant institutions under the Hatch Act. As a result of the Evans-Allen formula, funding for black land- grant institutions increased from $21,752,000 in 1977 to $49,300,000 in 1990 (Mayberry, 1991).

The resulting lump sum and yearly appropriations from the federal government were continued under President Ronald Reagan's White House initiative to strengthen the educational and research programs of historically black universities and colleges. These appropriations resulted in increased research activity at black land grant institutions, with a notable focus on issues of concern to limited resource populations and small farmers specifically. For instance, Fort Valley State College in Georgia has projects to help small scale, limited resource farmers diversify and strengthen their operations. It designed programs to help poor rural residents overcome adverse economic conditions. Southern University in Louisiana has programs that focus on applied, action oriented research and extension activities designed to help small farm holders and indigenous families. Alcorn University in Mississippi developed programs to increase income opportunities for low income rural dwellers and address basic needs in rural development. Many black land grant institutions focus successfully on areas of traditional concern. In addition, many programs reflect an interest in non traditional areas, such as the remote sensing research conducted at Alabama A&M University and research on aquaculture at Florida A&M University. Notable research accomplishments in the plant, animal, and rural social sciences have been made by scientists at black land grant institutions.

In 1977, measures were taken to strengthen extension programs at black land grant institutions through new authorizations provided in the Food and Agriculture Act of that year. The act provided for the direct allocation of formula funds to black land grant institutions at no less than 4 percent of funds included in Smith-Lever. It stipulated that black land grant and white land grant institutions work together to develop statewide extension programs. To this end, black land grant and white land grant institutions work under two memorandums of understanding (MOU), one between the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the respective black land grant institutions and the other between the black and white land grant institutions in respective states to better coordinate extension activities. Although both black land grant and white land grant institutions are expected to meet the needs of limited resource populations, black land grant institutions have been especially directed in programmatic documents to respond to the needs of these groups.

Current Status and Future Directions

Several policies have been enacted since the 1970s to compensate black land grant institutions for the sustained lack of funding for research and extension programs and to shape new relational and task configurations between black land grant and white land grant institutions. Despite these efforts, black land grant institutions continue as a subgroup of the land grant system because of the economic and political forces that denied full citizenship to Africans freed from slavery after the Civil War.

With the continually changing rural landscape, however, there are unique opportunities for black land grant institutions to draw upon their legacies of self-determination, self-sufficiency, and community-centered agricultural development practices and to distinguish themselves in the newer priorities set by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. These priorities include sustainable agriculture, food safety, and rural development, all strengths of the black land grant institutions. By enhancing these programs and expanding their clientele base to include middle- and working-class whites, His-panic and Native American peoples, black land grant institutions will be in a unique position to support the agricultural and rural development needs of populations that are overlooked in most policy decisions and the often forgotten places of rural America the "Black Belt" (14 census- designated states in the South where 33 percent or more of the population is African American), the Carolina Piedmont, the coastal plains, the Virginia tidewater, the Louisiana bayou, and the Mississippi and Tennessee River valleys. Increasingly these will be the locus of rural development policy deliberations and black land grant institutions will continue to be in the best position to keep the unique needs and interests of these regions present in the policy discourse.

References

Anderson, James D. The Education of Blacks in the South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988.

Bond, Horace Mann. The Education of the Negro in the American Social Order. New York: Octagon, 1966.

Bullock, Henry A. A History of Negro Education in the South: From 1619 to the Present. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967.

Civil Rights Action Team. Civil Rights at the United Slates Department of Agriculture. Washington, DC.: United States Department of Agriculture, 1997.

Du Bois, W.E.B. Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880. New York: Meridian Books: The World Publishing Company, 1967.

Marbury, Carl H. "The Decline in Black-Owned Rural Land: Challenge to the Historically Black Institutions of Higher Education" in Leo McGee and Robert Boone (eds.), The Black Rural Landowner-Endangered Species. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1979.

Mayberry, Bennie D. A. A Century of Agriculture in the 1890 Land Grant Institutions and Tuskegee University - 1890-1990. New York: Vintage Press, 1991.

Schor, Joel. Agriculture in the Black land grant System to 1930. Tallahassee: Florida A&M University, 1982.

Schor, Joel. The Black Presence in the U.S. Cooperative Extension Service to 1983: A Profile. Unpublished manuscript, Agricultural History Branch: USDA, 1983.

Trueheart, William E. "The Consequences of Federal and State Resource Allocation and Development Policies for Traditionally Black land grant Institutions 1862-1954. Cambridge: Harvard University, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation.

Wood, S. D. and J. Gilbert. North America Series: Re-entering African-American Farmers: Recent Trends and a Policy Rationale. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin, 1998.

ROSALIND P. HARRIS

University of Kentucky

H. DREAMAL WORTHEN

Florida A&M University

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