The U.S. withdrawal from 31 UN entities, including the Permanent Forum on People of African Descent and the Economic Commission for Africa, exposes a long-standing weakness: African America has reached the multilateral system only through Washington. HBCU Politics argues that the vacancy is an opening. HBCU alumni foundations, private HBCUs, and Black-owned banks and credit unions can build their own international standing through ECOSOC consultative status, a standing Permanent Forum delegation, ECA research partnerships, and talent pipelines into Africa Core institutions, with the Second International Decade for People of African Descent providing a runway through 2034. Continue reading
Tag Archives: HBCU Foreign Policy
HBCU Politics™ Profile – From Central State to Meharry Medical College, How America’s Black Colleges Shaped Malawi’s First President
Before he was the Father of Malawi, Hastings Kamuzu Banda was a young African scholar crossing the red clay paths of Central State University in Ohio and later walking the white-pillared corridors of Meharry Medical College in Tennessee. It was in those Black institutions—far from colonial Nyasaland—that he found the intellectual courage and cultural clarity to imagine an independent African state governed by its own people. Banda didn’t just earn degrees at HBCUs; he absorbed a vision. A vision where Black institutions were sovereign, where education was a weapon, and where leadership was forged in community, not conquest. His presidency in Malawi would later reflect both the power and pitfalls of that vision. Continue reading
