Thomas Breen photo
Dixwell Alder Jeanette Morrison, with City Librarian John Jessen: Attending an HBCU was the “best decision that I made in my life.”
Dixwell Alder Jeanette Morrison knew almost nothing about historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) when she submitted an application to Morgan State University her senior year at Hillhouse High School.
After four years surrounded by peers, teachers, and administrators who looked like her, talked like her, and held a shared understanding of what it means to be black in America, she knew she had made one of the best decisions of her life.
Morrison opened up about the transformative impact that attending an HBCU had on her life after a recent meeting of the Board of Alders in the Aldermanic Chambers on the second floor of City Hall.
The five-term Dixwell alder and New Haven native joined City Librarian John Jessen to promote five upcoming screenings of the 2017 PBS documentary Tell Them We Are Rising that the New Haven Free Public Library will be hosting in conjunction with the Board of Alders Black & Hispanic Caucus.
The movie, directed by Stanley Nelson and Marco Williams, tells the 150-year history of HBCUs and the critical role they have played in providing open, rigorous, and affirming educational environments for Americans so long excluded from predominantly white institutions because of the color of their skin.
“College is way more than books, pencils, and four walls,” said Morrison, who earned a bachelor’s degree in social work from Morgan State before getting a master’s at Boston University.
“It’s about an experience. And to go to an HBCU and to have professors and people in charge, administrators, all who look like you. That sends a message.”
This marks the third year running that the library and the Black & Hispanic Caucus have teamed up to screen Tell Them We Are Rising, and the first year that screenings will take place at each of the city’s five public library branches. See the bottom of this article for a complete list of showtimes.
Morrison said she didn’t learn about the history of HBCUs and the role they have played in black social, political, and intellectual history until she stepped foot on Morgan State College’s campus as an 18-year-old freshman in 1986.
The only reason she had applied to the Maryland HBCU in the first place was because she had run into her aunt while at a college fair in Hartford, and her aunt had told her that her cousin had just finished her first year at Morgan State and was very happy there.
“That was the best decision that I made in my life,” Morrison said.
“When you want to learn about you, not just the academics, when you want to learn about you and where you come from, a HBCU would be the right place for you,” she said. “You not only learn about you, but you see representatives of you in the classrooms, on the campus, in the administrative offices. Everywhere you go, you see a representation of what you can be.”
March is “HBCU Awareness Month,” Morrison said. Thus the push to get the word out locally about the history of these schools.
Jessen added that the Tell Them We Are Rising screenings are geared not just for people like Morrison, who have attended HBCUs and recognize the value those schools have played in their own lives, but also for local high school students who may want to go to college outside of the Elm City.
“It’s kind of like, ‘Look at this other world. Look at this other experience you might not have been thinking about,’” Jessen said about the documentary. He said the movie serves in part to “inspire young people to see the world in a way they might not have looked at it before.”
Each screening will be followed by a conversation facilitated by Danielle Williams, the vice president of programs for the National Board of Directors of the United Negro College Fund Alumni Council.
A graduate of Bennett College in Greensboro, N.C., Williams told the Independent by phone that she didn’t have her first African American teacher until she got to high school at Wilbur Cross in the late 1980s.
Her English teacher, Mrs. Priscilla Dove, “was a very warm and demanding teacher,” Williams recalled. She had grown up in the south and attended an HBCU herself before being recruited up north to teach in New Haven.
“She took my under her wing and taught me a lot more than just English. She taught me about life,” Williams said.
Just as Morrison said, Williams said she believes HBCUs today play a critical role in teaching primarily African American students more than just academics. “We offer a foundation in learning that we are the legacy of our ancestors who sacrificed for us to get an opportunity to get an education like this,” she said.
The screenings will take place at Westville’s Mitchell Library on March 9 from 6 to 8 p.m., at the Hill’s Wilson Library on March 10 from 6 to 8 p.m., at Dixwell’s Stetson Library on March 11 from 6 to 8 p.m., at the Fair Haven Library on March 12 from 6 to 8 p.m., and at the Ives Main Library on Elm Street on March 14 from 10:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. and from 2:30 p.m. to 4:30 p.m.