The State Must Provide: A Conversation with Adam Harris
Episode description
In this edition of Entrepreneurial Appetite's Black Book Discussions, we feature conversations with Adam Harris, staff writer for The Atlantic Magazine and author of The State Must Provide: Why America's Colleges Have Always Been Unequal--and How to Set Them Right.
About the Author: Adam Harris is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he has covered education and national politics since 2018. He was previously a reporter at the Chronicle of Higher Education, where he covered federal education policy and historically black colleges and universities. He is a 2021 New America Fellow and the recipient of the Rising Star Award by the News Media Alliance.
About the Book: In The Stat Must Provide, Adam Harris reckons with the history of a higher education system that has systematically excluded Black people from its benefits, weaving through the legal, social, and political obstacles erected to block equitable education in the United States, studying the Black Americans who fought their way to an education, pivotal Supreme Court cases like Plessy v. Ferguson and Brown v. Board of Education, and the government’s role in creating and upholding a segregated education system. Finally, he explores the role that Civil War-era legislation intended to bring agricultural education to the masses had in creating the HBCUs that had played such a major part in educating Black students when other state and private institutions refused to accept them.