I taught social studies in Newark, New Jersey, in a Black high school where everyone agreed college was the way out. It was application season, and my seniors were coming at me from every direction for recommendation letters. So I was sitting with their forms in front of me — their lists of where they wanted to go — and I kept noticing the same thing. School after school. Not one HBCU on any of them. No historically Black colleges or universities.
I said it plainly to my AP U.S. History seniors. I don’t see any HBCUs on here. I don’t see a single one.
That sent me to my other classes with a simpler question. How many of you even know what an HBCU is? And that is when I found out. Most of them did not.
These were brilliant kids. College-bound, some of them. And not one could tell me what a historically Black college was, or that the teachers standing in front of them every day — the ones who taught them to analyze a primary source and write a thesis — had been built by those very institutions. Nobody had foreclosed the door on them with a lock. They just made sure the children never knew the door was there.
By hiding that door, they withheld a better future from many of my kids. Recent research following more than a million Black students found that enrolling at an HBCU made them significantly more likely to finish a bachelor’s degree. Because HBCU schools serve many more low-income students, they outperform comparable white institutions on retention, on social mobility, on graduate earnings — and build the belonging that the data keeps tying to better outcomes, including better health decades later.
So, after that, every Black History Month, I made it an assignment. Posters. Presentations. Research the schools. Learn how they came to be, and why. I was not teaching pride for its own sake. I was teaching them that a door existed, because the system was counting on them never finding out.
I think about those kids now, watching what is happening in my own state.
NAACP starts boycott against states attacking Black voting power
On April 29, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down Louisiana v. Callais and gutted what was left of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Three weeks later, the NAACP launched “Out of Bounds,” asking Black athletes and fans to withhold their talent and their money from public universities in eight Southern states that are moving to weaken Black voting power. The slogan was blunt. No Representation. No Recruitment. No Revenue.
The NAACP asked Black athletes and recruits to withhold commitments, “to ask coaches and athletic directors where their universities stand on voting rights, and to visit and seriously consider HBCUs.”
In response to the NAACP’s demands, the NCAA stayed quiet. So the Congressional Black Caucus killed the SCORE Act, a federal bill that would have shielded the NCAA’s name, image, and likeness market from lawsuits. Their reasoning was clean. “Silence in the face of injustice is not neutrality — it is complicity,” they said. Institutions that profit from Black bodies cannot stay silent while Black political power is dismantled.
But the eight states on the NAACP’s list — Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas — make up the footprint of the SEC, the Southeastern Conference, a powerhouse conference. Because the South historically didn’t have pro teams, Southern people put much of their energy — and money — into college games.
I have written in these pages that the fields are still there. Plantation to penitentiary. Sharecropping to mass incarceration. Poll tax to closed primary. The land does not change. Only the paperwork does.
The athletic-recruiting pipeline is the newest paperwork.
Boycotting bus segregation, versus boycotting the SEC — the role of big money
Here is where I have to be honest about why this fight is harder than the ones that came before it.
In 1953, in Baton Rouge, Black riders were 80% of the city’s bus passengers and were forced to stand while seats reserved for white riders sat empty. So they stopped riding.
The Rev. T.J. Jemison and local churches organized a free-ride network, neighbors hauling neighbors to work in their own cars. The boycott nearly broke the bus company in a week. Two years later, when Montgomery began, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. called Jemison to ask how it was done — and wrote in his own book that what Jemison told him “proved invaluable.”
Baton Rouge taught Montgomery how to boycott.
And here is the thing about 1953. Yes, bus segregation was about policy failure. Our government officials did not have the courage to open up entire buses for Black passengers. But the community worked together to offer rides to those faced with walking long distances to work or school.
That is not the choice in front of a Black 18-year-old in 2026. A Black standout football player who honors the NAACP boycott could instead attend an HBCU. And we know that the education and community might be better. But he will face monetary losses that should not be his alone to shoulder. If the NAACP wants athletes to boycott SEC schools, then it has to follow the Jemison bus-boycott model. Like the free rides replaced what the buses offered, the NAACP and everyone who supports this boycott needs to replace what the SEC offers.
If a young athlete truly has the desire to play and sees the potential to earn money, the SEC is in a position to support them, given its substantial financial resources compared to HBCUs. Initially, SEC schools created collectives that shuttled significant money to college athletes, by helping them to get paid for the use of their name, image, and likeness (NIL). And now, under last year’s settlement, a single university can pay its athletes more than $20 million a year, the vast majority of which flows to football and men’s basketball — the rooms with the Blackest rosters.
For the NAACP, the boycott is about being true to basic fairness, in voting. But talented high school athletes, who have risen early and trained long hours, cannot see the fairness in an NAACP boycott that aspires to hurt Southern states by lashing out at SEC sports programs. The boycott ultimately asks a Black athlete to refuse money because of vote-weakening policies forged by Republican legislatures who only care about him when he is scoring touchdowns or sinking three-pointers.
Choosing an SEC school is not greed on the kid’s part. It’s not abandonment of principle. For a child coming out of a neighborhood that the economy abandoned, the money is a real exit from a real trap that forces choices between the streets and a shot at the pros and some actual legal money.
The bus rider in 1953 who participated in the boycott risked a long walk. The recruit in 2026 is being asked to risk his one way out. Those are not the same ask. And any honest person has to say so.
What we owe top athletes who choose HBCUs
The NAACP boycott is asking the Black athlete to redirect his talent toward HBCUs.
These are the same schools the system already taught him not to want. That should keep us up at night. The pitch sold to Black kids — go where the majority does not look like you, that is the real world, that is where the jobs are — gets diversity exactly backwards.
On a campus where you are one of the few, you are not experiencing diversity. You are providing it. You are the seasoning in someone else’s pot.
That support is key. Because for decades, HBCU schools were designed to be deficient. By the federal government’s own accounting, 16 states underfunded their Black land-grant universities by roughly $13 billion between 1987 and 2020. Louisiana was on that list. Southern University was on that list. The state kept the schools poor for a century, then pointed at their lack of resources to steer the children somewhere else, like an SEC school.
I am a product of Southern University, in Baton Rouge, starting in 1992 — 16 years before Columbia University accepted me for graduate school in 2008. The HBCU built me first. The Ivy League inherited what Southern made.
That order matters, and the system depends on children never learning that it runs that way.
So let me tell you what Southern taught us, in lessons that resonate within the HBCU: The path to the future doesn’t follow only one road. The coaches and the professors emphasized conditioning and discipline. The deeper lesson was self-possession — that your talent was always yours, portable, not owned by any institution that signed your check. The HBCU does not just educate. It teaches young Black people that the body, the work, and the future belong to them.
The NAACP boycott is fighting downstream, in the recruiting cycle. The real fight is upstream.
It is in a classroom, in February, with a Black History Month poster and a speech, and a child learning for the first time that the door to the HBCU was always there. It is on Southern athletic fields in early February, just before National Signing Day, when some of our region’s top athletes run patterns during evening practices in front of HBCU recruiters who have arrived with offers that support both fair representation across the South and fair revenue for top Black athletes, who should be able to follow their principles without having to take a back seat.
Andrea Hagan is a criminology instructor at Loyola University New Orleans and the founder of Pattern Hunters, LLC, a public scholarship platform that focuses on criminology, community engagement, and accountability. Further information is available at patternhunters.com.
