WASHINGTON — February should have been a month of celebration. But for many historically Black colleges and universities, or HBCUs, it was a time of anxiety, frustration and terror.
Dozens of schools have received bomb threats this year, prompting congressional inquiries, an FBI investigation and demands that the culprits be found and publicly brought to justice.
Senior officials in President Joe Biden’s administration, including his Education and Homeland Security secretaries, have stressed to HBCU leaders on individual and group calls that they have the administration’s full backing.
“We let them know that whatever support that we can provide, we’re going to provide,” Education Secretary Miguel Cardona told McClatchy in an interview.
More than a third of the 101 institutions recognized as HBCUs have been threatened with violence since the beginning of January. At least 34 of those schools have received bomb threats, according to data compiled by the United Negro College Fund. Several institutions, including Howard University in Washington, D.C., and Spelman College in Atlanta, were targeted multiple times.
The foreboding calls, emails and anonymous messages have been disruptive to the mental health and educational experience of students on those campuses, HBCU leaders and advocates say.
“They’re coming to institutions of higher education to be able to better themselves and be great citizens,” said Dwaun Warmack, president of Clafflin University in Orangeburg, South Carolina, “but they are being threatened — their life — just for going to college and just for trying to do what we define here as the American dream.”
An increase during Black History Month
The bomb threats intensified during Black History Month, and the FBI said in public statements that it was treating them as racially motivated hate crimes.
Although the FBI reportedly identified six juvenile suspects in conjunction with the bomb threats in early February, in the month since, it has made no known arrests. The FBI declined to provide additional information in response to a request for comment.
Florida Rep. Frederica Wilson has been pushing the Department of Justice to provide lawmakers with more information and said in an interview that she worries the perpetrators have become emboldened.
“I’m outraged that these threats are being made against HBCUs. And to me, they’re not being taken as seriously as they should,” Wilson said.
Wilson, a Democrat who represents the Miami area, said she pressed the deputy Homeland Security secretary for help arranging a classified briefing for lawmakers when he came to Florida with first lady Jill Biden last month. The FBI later provided lawmakers with an unclassified briefing, but Wilson said in a statement that it wasn’t enough.
Rep. Alma Adams, a Democrat from North Carolina who founded the HBCU Caucus in the House and represents the city of Charlotte, said she also struggled to get information from the FBI about the threats, prior to last week’s unclassified briefing.
Adams said HBCU chancellors and presidents had communicated to her that students and administrators at their schools remain apprehensive.
“It is a pretty frightening experience for these young people, if you’re not focused on your academic work, because you are concerned about whether or not somebody is going to blow up the campus or come in and shoot up your dormitory,” Adams said.
A history of violence aimed at the schools and their students is contributing to the alarm.
House Democratic Whip Jim Clyburn, who attended South Carolina State University in Orangeburg and represents that same area in Congress, compared the current atmosphere to the turbulence of the civil rights era.
“We’d better take these kinds of things serious. I was around in the ‘60s on these college campuses. And we know what happened on these campuses. And we’d better be careful,” Clyburn said.
Florida A&M University President Larry Robinson recalled bombings at the school’s Tallahassee campus in 1999 during his second year working at the college.
Robinson said that experience and current threats to Florida’s other historically Black educational institutions led FAMU to preemptively work with local law enforcement to assess the campus’ readiness and communicate to students and faculty the appropriate steps to take if the university comes under threat.
“It’s important for people to know that these types of threats are occurring in 2022 — these are not just things from our past. This is a mindset that people have in our current reality,” Robinson said.
Congress investigates
The Senate unanimously passed a resolution condemning bomb threats against HBCUs on Monday, and the Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing Tuesday that looks at ways to combat the rise in hate crimes across the country. Last month the House Judiciary Committee held a hearing on the rise in violence against minority institutions.
Rep. Byron Donalds, a Florida Republican from Naples, has asked the House Oversight Committee to hold a public hearing to bring attention to the issue, but he said a classified briefing would also be helpful.
“The key thing is trying to do what we can to make sure that you know communities, specifically HBCU communities, are staying safe,” Donalds said. “Us having that access to that information might be able to not just help with what’s happening in investigations but might help with policy shaping going forward.”
President Biden in his first on-camera remarks about the menacing behavior said last week during a Black History Month event at the White House that his administration was “ready to closely investigate the cowardly, un-American” bomb threats against HBCUs.
Clyburn said that he thanked Biden for raising the issue when they spoke after the event.
Lodriguez Murray, senior vice president of public policy and government affairs at the United Negro College Fund, said that White House and Biden administration engagement on the issue is appreciated.
“But the closure can only come from law enforcement and them showcasing to anyone who has an animus — unfounded animus — against these institutions that their efforts to harm or intimidate these campuses will not be tolerated and they will be punished to the fullest extent of the law,” Murray said.
Potential bombs on the campuses are just one of several types of threats that the schools are facing, Murray added. Cyber threats, election-related threats, defacing of campus property and general threats to students have also had HBCU leaders, graduates and advocates on edge.
An anonymous caller told Clark Atlanta University last month that a group of white men armed with assault rifles would be coming to the Georgia college’s campus to kill as many students as possible, the college’s president, George T. French Jr., said.
French said that the caller claimed to have committed similar crimes in the past and that the campus went into lockdown for about 2.5 hours, with students and faculty sheltering in place. Helicopters monitored the situation overhead as bomb-sniffing dogs and a SWAT team conducted a thorough search of the campus, French said.
“We understand this threat was designed to be disruptive. And we are just really minimizing as much disruption that we can as an institution,” he said.
French said that at a United Negro College Fund event in Washington last week, private schools that are members of the advocacy group discussed the threats and agreed to send a letter to Cardona and the Department of Education pushing for additional resources to help HBCUs monitor threats and for the federal investigation to continue until the perpetrators are arrested.
Avenues of support
Biden said in his Black History Month remarks that HBCUs had received $5.8 billion in federal funding since he took office, for debt relief and pandemic assistance, and lawmakers and Cabinet officials told McClatchy that they are working to create other avenues of support for the schools, including through an appropriations bill that Congress hopes to pass this week and ongoing visits to their campuses.
“Me being on these campuses is a reflection that this administration does support them and cares for their safety and will do everything in our power to protect them,” Cardona said.
Cardona recently visited North Carolina Central University in Durham, and Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm met with HBCU presidents last month during a visit to South Carolina State University with Clyburn.
Granholm said in an interview after her visit that HBCU leaders were eager to partner with the administration on an initiative she was there to announce that is intended to bring greater diversity to the energy and technology workforces.
“This administration has got a very strong, and will continue to have a very strong, relationship with HBCUs,” Granholm said.
