Cecilia Abbott sits on the board of trustees of Huston-Tillotson University, a historically Black institution in Austin, Texas. She is the wife of Governor Greg Abbott — a UT Austin alumnus whose institution spent sixty years absorbing Black East Austin through eminent domain, whose administration has made the rollback of Black institutional support its signature domestic achievement, whose state has never permitted its only Black institution of the first class to govern itself on equal terms with its white peers, and who declined to act when his own appointees at Texas Southern University drove that institution toward governance collapse. There is a common assumption that private HBCUs occupy safer ground than their public counterparts — that self-governance insulates them from the gubernatorial power that has always threatened public Black institutions. The Huston-Tillotson situation exposes that assumption as dangerously incomplete: the governor’s influence does not require statutory authority when it can walk through the front door of a private institution’s boardroom. Continue reading
Tag Archives: Black institutional power
Witnessing Is Not Enough: Alabama’s Prison Crisis and the Defense Frameworks Black America Has Yet to Build
The crisis documented in The Alabama Solution does not begin at sentencing — it begins at arrest. A significant portion of the people inside Alabama’s jails on any given day have not been convicted of anything; they are there because they cannot afford bail. They lose their jobs, their housing, and their families while waiting for a trial that may be months or years away, and then accept plea deals simply to get out — taking on a criminal record they never would have accepted had they been free during the process. A community defense fund that focuses only on post-conviction litigation while leaving people to rot in pretrial detention is fighting the fire from the wrong end. Bail funds are not charity. They are a structural intervention in a system that uses poverty as a substitute for guilt. Continue reading
The Tiger’s Mouth: Why African America’s Quest for Fairness and Justice Misses the Power Game
Winston Churchill’s metaphor about reasoning with tigers captures a truth that much of Black America and the African Diaspora have yet to fully internalize: power doesn’t negotiate with those it has already consumed. Walk through any major American city and observe the divergent approaches to group advancement—in African American neighborhoods, the conversation centers on protest, representation, and recognition, while in Koreatown, Little India, Chinese enclaves, and Arab business districts, the conversation is about capital formation, business networks, and political leverage through economic power. The contrast is not about culture or capability—African Americans built this country with enslaved labor that generated the capital for American industrialization—it’s about strategy. We’ve been sold a vision of progress that depends on the oppressor’s recognition rather than our own autonomous power-building, still trying to reason with the tiger instead of building the strength to force open its jaws. Continue reading
HBCU Politics 