While Vice President Kamala Harris is an HBCU alum and has been backed by numerous alumni and former leaders, she can’t necessarily count on HBCU support.
In an interview with Politico, an interim president at an HBCU in Alabama appeared concerned that they “still have real policy issues” to address with presidential candidates.
“As a president, we should say who is speaking to our issues, and then we should tell our constituents to say, ‘We need to vote for people who will work with our issues,’” Walter Kimbrough, interim president at Talladega College in Alabama, said. “We do understand the symbolism and the historical significance of what is happening. But we still have real policy issues and items that we want to have addressed.”
If elected, Harris would be the first black female president, the second-ever black president, and the first president who went to an HBCU. But that may not be enough.
Former President Donald Trump signed the Future Act into law, which made permanent $255 million in federal funding for HBCUs. He said his commitment to HBCUs was “bigger and better and stronger than any previous administration by far.”
Democrats have clashed with HBCUs in recent history. Former President Barack Obama’s administration toyed with the idea of cutting HBCU funding, and House Democrats later declined to direct more funding to HBCUs at the Biden administration‘s directive.
Harris and Trump’s campaigns have been less policy-driven and more personality-driven, Lodriguez Murray, senior vice president of government affairs at the United Negro College Fund, told the outlet.
“By this time in 2020, we’d had all the discussions and we knew what they agreed with and what we didn’t agree with,” she said. “Because this campaign has been much more personality focused than policy-focused, you don’t have that galvanizing force of, ‘I have talked to them about this substantively, and I know that they are invested.‘“
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Harris has invested some time in this campaign into her alma mater, Howard University. She underwent debate preparation there and spoke to students.
Her former school called it an “extraordinary moment” when she was selected as President Joe Biden’s running mate in 2020.