Shelter in a Time of Storm: How Black Colleges Fostered Generations of Leadership and Activism by Jelani M. Favors

Abstract

Reviewed by: Shelter in a Time of Storm: How Black Colleges Fostered Generations of Leadership and Activism by Jelani M. Favors Vanessa Garry Shelter in a Time of Storm: How Black Colleges Fostered Generations of Leadership and Activism. By Jelani M. Favors. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. Pp. xii, 354. $29.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-4833-0.) From their inception, historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) have been used by Black faculty as safe spaces to promote race uplift and foster generations of student activists. Jelani M. Favors uses student voices in newspaper articles and scrapbooks as a lens to explore HBCUs' purpose and the [End Page 926] development of student activists, as well as to discern how faculty's teachings and experiences influenced student uprisings against Jim Crow. The HBCUs featured in the book include the Institute for Colored Youth (now Cheyney University of Pennsylvania), Tougaloo College, Bennett College, Alabama State University, Jackson State University, Southern University, and North Carolina A&T University, and Favors covers the operations of the institutions between 1837 and 1974. The narratives reveal how the arm's-length engagement of the founding white governing bodies of HBCUs resulted in administrators and faculty surreptitiously expanding the curriculum to address race consciousness. The flash-point events and students' uprisings included in the narratives demonstrate the strategy worked. Three aims of the book are an examination of the faculty's and administrators' intentions regarding the second curriculum, an analysis of its impact on students and surrounding communities, and an assessment of how it shaped the growth and dissemination of the civil rights movement. Favors argues that the second curriculum sowed the seeds of idealism and resistance. The author adeptly narrates how the faculty's teaching of content wrapped in culturalism slowly ignited students unflinching boldness to confront Jim Crow in ways the generations before them did not. For example, the Alabama State University narrative unfolds with Harper Councill Trenholm assuming the presidency of the university after the death of his father, George Washington Trenholm. At the start of his tenure, H. C. Trenholm embraced the New Negro movement by supporting Carter G. Woodson's Negro History Week campaign. It required all faculty to teach their discipline coupled with African American history—a strategy embraced by students. Faculty's inculcations resulted in bold activism such as the Alabama State University students' boycott in 1951 that shuttered the nearby white-owned grocery store of Sam Green, who was accused of raping his fifteen-year-old Black babysitter, Flossie Hardman. This was a preview of activism that characterized the civil rights movement. Favors deftly supports his thesis with skillful storytelling, narrow focus, and well-documented details. An artful storyteller, Favors writes with a distinct sense of place and a cast of prominent historical actors (who were sometimes professionally interconnected between the HBCUs). In fact, the author is so skilled at storytelling that it was disappointing to reach the waning of the civil rights movement due to white institutions' recruitment of HBCUs' talent and the drop off of students' organizing owing to overlapping missions and lack of leadership. However, the epilogue creates a transition closing the gap from then to now. The author narrows the focus to the development of student activism using rich data to amplify student voices and to illustrate how activism morphed from African Americans striving for respect in the nineteenth century to ultimately demanding equal rights at great peril during the 1960s. Favors fills a gap in the HBCU literature because his book highlights the students' voices who are usually understudied. The author supports his claims with a plethora of resources such as archival data found in HBCU libraries and state historical societies, countless interviews conducted by the author and others, websites, government publications, dissertations, and numerous local and HBCU news-papers. Historians, teachers, social scientists, and students will find this book an [End Page 927] essential resource for studying HBCUs. Furthermore, it gives a blueprint for what freedom or equality looks like today and in the future. Vanessa Garry University of Missouri, St. Louis Copyright © 2020 Southern Historical Association