The Whitest Historically Black College In America

How Bluefield State, a historically black college, became a school where 90 percent of the students are now white:

“In 1966, the state picked Wendell G. Hardway to lead the college — the school’s first white president. Deirdre Guyton, who runs the college’s alumni affairs department, said that Hardway was the first president to live off campus rather than at Hatter Hall, the house in the center of campus named for the school’s black founder. By 1968, according to the book Bluefield State College Centennial History, Hardway had hired 23 new faculty members — all of whom were white. The book goes on to say that the college’s dedicated faculty, which had been all-black as recently as 1954, was only 30 percent black by 1967. If there was a tug of war over what the college was going to be, many of the black alumni and students felt they were losing. Bluefield State was quickly becoming unrecognizable.

“That tug of war looked a lot like battles being waged across the country, like the growing divide between black folks who believed in nonviolence as an avenue to black progress and those who felt that method was taking too long and yielding too little. During halftime at homecoming in 1967, black students staged a demonstration on the football field to protest what they saw as Hardway’s discrimination against black faculty and students. Things got rowdy. The police were called. Students were suspended.”

Source: NPR
Published: Oct 18, 2013
Length: 14 minutes (3,665 words)

When Our Kids Own America

The U.S. is experiencing significant demographic changes. In 2011, people of color made up more than half of all the country’s births. A look at the cultural shift that’s occurring as young people begin to inherit the country:

“Demographic changes — even seismic changes like those the U.S. is going through — happen over decades. It will be a long time before this young, much more plural America starts to fully reveal patterns of employment, migration, housing and wealth. But these young folks are already starting to create culture, and it bears taking a close look at what they’re making to see what it might augur about the world they’re going to inherit.”

Author: Gene Demby
Source: NPR
Published: Apr 15, 2013
Length: 19 minutes (4,915 words)