By Tiffany Pennamon
Alas, it is HBCU Homecoming season and I’m feeling much pride and a bit of nostalgia for the days I walked the grounds of my undergraduate institution, thee illustrious Spelman College. This nostalgia is sitting on my spirit particularly because the place where I now work – the first degree-granting HBCU, Lincoln University – just wrapped up a beautiful week of programming for the Black Public History Festival.
The week’s events underscored the value and sacredness of HBCUs as spaces for incubating revolutionary leaders and artists such as Kwame Nkrumah and Elizabeth Catlett; affirming and protecting the brilliance, beauty, and joy of our Black youth; and preserving our languages, traditions, history, and culture as a collective. Seeing students, faculty, staff, friends, and more show up each night reminded me that, as a people, we have always made something beautiful with the least amount of resources, and sometimes, under the harshest of circumstances.
Though HBCUs are not without their flaws, I know there are people like myself and my Ubuntu Center faculty colleagues who are doing the work and creating lifelines for each other, our students, and our communities beyond our respective campus gates. We hope to model for others the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration and the many ways knowledge can be built and shared, transcending traditional academic forms through the arts, intuitive silence, and dialogue.
October will bring cool mornings and familiar faces at homecoming tailgate. But more than this, autumn is a time for honoring the past while striving towards better futures for us all.