A Student-Debt Crisis Hits Hardest at Historically Black Colleges

Link to article (It has autoplay enabled). https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/vbq8y9/white-student-at-a...

Among other things, he bootstrapped the agriculture program at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, at the invitation of Booker T Washington.

Carver was an exceptionally polite and religious man, the sort of person racists could label as 'one of the good ones' and that helped grease some wheels for him. He also a very clever and intuitive man who had a number thoughts on ecology that are just being echoed in modern rethinking of agricultural and land management practices, nearly a hundred years later. Way ahead of his time (which did not work in his favor). But I digress.

What he found when he moved to Alabama: after the Civil War, slaves were freed but the land was still owned by the landed gentry. Everyone was 'free' but they worked as sharecroppers, on second-rate farmland. They were also told they couldn't plant certain things, like food for subsistence. So they were constantly cycling debt loads every year buying food and supplies, waiting for the crop to come in, keeping them constantly off balance. They also couldn't afford the expensive equipment that was featured heavily in the Green Revolution of the time. Speaking out against this earned him some enemies, and if I recall a lot of friction with Washington.

Adam Conover, in an episode about diversity in suburbs, talks about many things, but one that stuck out is higher interest rates for minorities, keeping them out or less secure than their white counterparts (maybe a case of racist algorithms?). The deck is still stacked.