Walter M. Kimbrough

Listen, man. I know I'm only one person, and people are going to feel the way they feel ultimately about Stephen A. Smith doing this interview. He's going to be a rich, powerful, and wealthy man regardless, but I've made HBCU advocacy and being a part of HBCU media my literal job. Seeing these lies propagated without any pushback is enraging me. 1) He did not provide a record amount of funding for HBCUs. Both Barack Obama and Joe Biden provided more money to HBCUs. He did not provide a record level of funding for HBCUs (both Obama and Biden allocated more). Trump's claim relies on the FUTURE Act of 2019, but that law just permanently renewed existing funding that had briefly lapsed—it didn't create a new, record-setting pot of money. 2) HBCUs were not failing before Donald Trump got into office and set aside that money. That's flagrantly false and disrespectful to HBCUs. Yes, HBCUs are under-resourced because many have been underfunded by state and local governments for decades, but HBCUs, as institutions across the nation, were not about to go bankrupt. Especially given the fact that Trump's administration followed the Barack Obama administration, and then this second one followed record investment by the Biden administration 3) In February 2017, Donald Trump signed an executive order to move the White House Initiative of HBCUs from under the Department of Education to directly under the White House. I know this for a fact because months later, I was a White House HBCU All Star in the 2017-2018 school year (now called White House Scholars). President Biden did move it back under the Department of Education, but it doesn't really matter what it is under if Trump isn't doing anything remotely meaningful with said initiative (outside of using it as his get-out-of-jail-free card when talking about these supposed things he's done for the Black community). 4) President Joe Biden had a board of advisors for HBCUs that featured Delaware State president Dr. Tony Allen as the leader of that board. They convened regularly. President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris also invited HBCU presidents to the White House during this same time. So saying Democrats didn't do that is patently false, but again, Stephen A. Smith isn't providing pushback. I know this will be the one tweet that doesn't go viral or get anybody to like or retweet it, and I don't really care because I'm going to say what I have to say. But I'm going to address this on my show next week. HBCU Pulse Radio. Don't worry about it.

So, minutes into the Stephen A. Smith interview with Donald Trump, he evokes HBCUs again. This time, to say that when he was at Tuskegee University for his live show for First Take during their homecoming, there were women there that want to thank Donald Trump for "eliminating debt to HBCUs”. Quite a start, huh? Lol. It's just very funny how HBCUs are always so centered in these conversations that Stephen A. has about Trump. I get Stephen A.'s passionate about HBCUs, but it just seems like an excuse to me.