For a whole bunch of reasons, the general public tends to think one of the primary goals of integration and desegregation of American schools is about Black parents, educators, and students getting into places where white students and educators are. It's more accurate to say that it was (is) about getting Black children access to the resources white children and educators have.

Keeping that in mind helps us better understand why, generally speaking, in the Jim Crow period between Reconstruction (after anti-literacy laws were lifted and the 13th and 14th Amendments were passed) and The 1964 Civil Rights Act, white adults weren't overly concerned with what was happening at Black schools, or about the nature of Black education. As long as there was a sense among white adults that what was happening was appropriate and the Black students and teachers were, to borrow a phrase, staying in their place, they didn't especially care.

Until Brown, the prevailing sentiment that shaped education in America at a national level came from Plessy v Ferguson (1896). It remains that with only a few exceptions, most notably the high schools in Washington, D.C., the "equal" part of "separate but equal" rarely happened. Some states even enshrined this notion of two separate systems of education into their state constitution. This meant a few things, practically speaking. First, white parents didn't have to "worry" about their children sitting next to Black students or learning from Black teachers as Black students and teachers had their "own" schools. (This also meant that Black parents could be confident their children would be looked after by adults who sincerely had their interests in mind. This is a good place to drop a reminder that Black parents' hesitancy around integration came/comes from a very different place than White parents'.) Second, it meant that Black families and communities were often double-taxed: they had to pay regular taxes that mostly went to the white schools and they had to close the gap between what their children's schools needed to operate and the limited taxes that their schools received.

The reason this context matters is that many HBCUs started as schools for people of all ages. (And I do mean all people in the universal sense. Unlike the Colonial Colleges, HBCUs have been open to learners of all races and ethnicities since their founding. The most common form this would take was the presence of white professors and teachers' children in classes alongside Black students.) In many cases, the school was funded by the Freeman's Bureau or funding from white religious organizations. To a certain extent, they served to mark the school among white adults, especially those in power, as appropriate. The schools became inappropriate, as it were, when white adults got the sense that what was happening at the school was about more than just a basic education. If there wasn't that sense - if the Black professors, teachers, and students were remaining sufficiently "separate", there was no particular need for Southern white adults to be especially concerned about what was happening in the classroom. Instead, white adults wanted to leave Black education to Black educators, as it helped shore up the normalization of "separate but equal."

A decade before the passage of the Civil Rights Act, the Supreme Court heard the case of Brown v. Board, which was actually a number of combined cases related to school desegregation. They ruled that public schools needed to desegregate, with all due haste. White adults in Southern states weren't especially fond of the proposal and expressed their displeasure in different ways. Florida opened 11 (or 12, counts vary) Black Junior colleges that were supposed to serve as evidence a state could support "separate but equal" Junior colleges for Black students. The schools all met with varying degrees of success and were closed following the ratification of the Civil Rights Act.

That said, it is important to stress that a great deal came down to the whims of any one group of white educational leaders, or white adults in general. If they felt that what was happening in a Black-led school was their business, they would make it their business. The staff at a Black school could spend years following their own curriculum, teaching children as they saw fit, and be told their entire approach had to change because of a change in a faraway district office. Jarvis Givens' new book, Fugitive Pedagogy, is a fascinating look at how Black educators worked around the restrictions placed on them by white school leaders and inspectors, including at HBCUs.