Diversity looks different in historically black colleges

PETERSBURG, Va. — In her four years at Virginia State University, Tracey Gaddy has befriended people from India and Guatemala, black students as dark as she is, and others with skin as white as it comes.

At the same time, her historically black school — chartered when free blacks in Virginia had virtually nowhere else to get an education — has nourished the 21-year-old from Charlotte, N.C., and given her a place where she feels people uniquely understand her, accept her and want to see her succeed.

For Miss Gaddy, the 93 percent-black student body offered the perfect combination of diversity and familiarity.

Her friend and fellow 2003 grad, Sharee Hines of Clinton quietly disagrees. She would like to have seen the school look a little more like the real world.

“My thinking then was, ‘Let me stick to what I know.’ Now sometimes I wish I had more of a mix,” says Miss Hines, 22, who is headed to George Washington University for graduate school. “But at the same time, this is your home.”

For the roughly 105 historically black U.S. colleges and universities, largely in the South, the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision permitting schools to continue carefully crafting diverse campuses isn’t expected to have an impact. But it would be a mistake to say they aren’t affected by the drive for diversity.

Some, like Atlanta’s Spelman College, a women’s school that is 97 percent black, take diversity it as it comes — largely in religious and geographic differences.

Others have begun actively recruiting nonblack students.

Norfolk State University, where the student population is about 88 percent black, opened a multicultural affairs office about four years ago. To attract Latino students, the school sponsors a Caribbean street festival in downtown Norfolk and holds a salsa-meringue dance contest on campus, on top of regular high school recruiting.

In Nashville, Fisk University has a certificate program with computer training, English classes and resume-writing tips for Hispanic students. The hope is that word will get around: The 825-student school, 86 percent black, welcomes Latinos.

They are also sought at Texas Southern University, the country’s third-largest historically black institution, with nearly 10,000 students. The Houston school recruits heavily along the Mexican border and offers scholarships to Hispanic students.

For largely white schools with histories of racial exclusion, diversity means welcoming, even inviting, descendants of generations of shunned students.

But Alvin Thornton, associate provost and political science professor at Howard University in Washington, says racial definitions of diversity can’t be the standard for historically black schools in the same way they often are for majority-white institutions.

“Racial diversity is not a starting point for historically black schools,” Mr. Thornton says. “At Howard, for example, the diversity goal is in terms of offerings, removing the one-dimensional curriculum that students were exposed to years ago.

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