Shelter in a Time of Storm - by Jelani M Favors (Paperback)

About the Book

"For generations, Black colleges have been essential institutions for the African American community. Their nurturing environments have not only aided in students' education and advancement. They have also offered spaces to develop racial consciousness and analyze the paradoxes embodied in American culture. The development and politicization of students on the campuses of historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) has resulted in waves of activism, catalyzing the modern Civil Rights Movement and forever altering the political destiny of the United States"--

Book Synopsis

2020 Museum of African American History Stone Book Award
2020 Lillian Smith Book Award
Finalist, 2020 Pauli Murray Book Prize

For generations, historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) have been essential institutions for the African American community. Their nurturing environments not only provided educational advancement but also catalyzed the Black freedom struggle, forever altering the political destiny of the United States. In this book, Jelani M. Favors offers a history of HBCUs from the 1837 founding of Cheyney State University to the present, told through the lens of how they fostered student activism.

Favors chronicles the development and significance of HBCUs through stories from institutions such as Cheyney State University, Tougaloo College, Bennett College, Alabama State University, Jackson State University, Southern University, and North Carolina A&T. He demonstrates how HBCUs became a refuge during the oppression of the Jim Crow era and illustrates the central role their campus communities played during the civil rights and Black Power movements. Throughout this definitive history of how HBCUs became a vital seedbed for politicians, community leaders, reformers, and activists, Favors emphasizes what he calls an unwritten "second curriculum" at HBCUs, one that offered students a grounding in idealism, racial consciousness, and cultural nationalism.

Review Quotes

"A tour de force. . . . By recovering the legacy of HBCUs in fostering generations of leadership and activism, Shelter in a Time of Storm offers a bold vision of the role that black colleges can still play for today's generation of college students and the issues they--and the rest of American society--currently face."--American Historical Review

"A welcome addition to the history of higher education and the contemporary scholarship on student activism, social movements, and leadership. . . . A powerful reminder that black colleges were not just a consequence of de jure segregation. They have been, and continue to be, a symbolic space that affirms the humanity and agency of black youth."--Academe

"Favors . . . details the integral role of black colleges in nurturing 'communitas' and the 'unwritten second curriculum' . . . which spearheaded activism among African Americans from the nadir of race relations (after Reconstruction) to the present day . . . Favors describes the second curriculum and communitas not as a subversive plot against American democracy, but instead as a beacon of hope for all people. Given recent spates of racial unrest across the nation and on college campuses, this book delivers a counternarrative that is at once historic and prescient."--CHOICE

"I have been waiting for a prodigious researcher and storyteller to reconstruct what has never been fully reconstructed: the story of historically Black colleges and universities' influence on Black activism. In Shelter in a Time of Storm, Jelani Favors has told that story, revealing how HBCUs have been the most fertile womb of Black activism in America throughout their history." -- Ibram X. Kendi, National Book Award-winning author of Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America

"Jelani Favors's superb account of the long history of activism, idealism, and race consciousness at historically Black colleges and universities will forever change the way we think about Black higher education in the United States. A brilliant study, Dr. Favors shows how generations of Black students and faculty forged 'blueprints for Black liberation' that defied the state's plans for social control and submission. Truly shelters in the storm, Black campuses nurtured minds and protected bodies from the ravages of American racism. Jelani Favors has finally given them much-deserved scholarly attention." -- Martha Biondi, author of The Black Revolution on Campus

"Jelani M. Favors has written the most profound, thorough, and nuanced work ever on the role of historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) in educating and developing generations of the Black student activists who shaped and reshaped the long struggle for freedom and equality. Reading his book awakens us to the fact that Black freedom fighters were not sudden creations of various social movements, but products of long-standing intellectual ideas and cultural norms cultivated within the walls of HBCUs. Anyone curious about the historical wellspring of Black student activism must read this lucid and painstaking presentation that traces the academic and social molding of generations of activists from the founding of the first HBCU to the apex of the Black Power movement. No student of the long freedom struggle can overlook Shelter in a Time of Storm." -- James D. Anderson, author of The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935

"Poignant. . . . Delves deeply into issues of student activism at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and sets out to write a more complex history of Black colleges."--African American Review

"This vivid exploration of an important topic is a must-read for anyone interested in higher education and HBCUs in particular."--Library Journal

"Well documented and richly detailed. . . . An important contribution to a comprehensive understanding of the long struggle for civil rights."--Journal of American History