By Albert Lin
Imagine the surprise of Howard University students when the circular for the local branch of Giant grocery store welcomed them back to school following the winter break with an image of a white woman.
One of the nation’s best known Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU)—U.S. News ranks it the No. 3 HBCU in the country—Howard has a student body is overwhelmingly Black. Of the 1,089 graduating seniors who responded to the school’s undergraduate exit survey in 2013, 84.6 percent identified themselves as African-American and another 6.1 percent identified as African. The number of white students in the class Four—not 4 percent, just four (0.37 percent). (Although the number of white students is increasing at HBCUs across the country.)
