Simmons HBCU President Kevin Cosby: Democrats Don’t Deliver Tangibles To Black America, Mistreat Us Photo: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of Calif., right, accompanied by Education and Labor Committee Chairman Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Va., left, speaks at a news conference to unveil the College Affordability Act on Capitol Hill in Washington, Oct. 15, 2019. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)
President Joe Biden’s $3.5 trillion spending bill was set to include $45 billion in spending for HBCUs and other minority-serving institutions (MSIs) but the latest version of the bill has allocated just $2 billion, a significant decrease, and Kevin Cosby, the president of HBCU Simmons College of Kentucky, isn’t happy.
According to Simmons, this drop in funding is just another indication that the Democrats have failed to deliver tangibles to Black America even though Black voters helped propel Biden into the White House.
The aid is currently penciled in at $1.45 billion to be distributed between 2022 and 2026, Black Enterprise reported.
The drastic decrease will impact Simmons College in Louisville, Kentucky. The HBCU was looking for significant funding to add new programs, classrooms, and dorms, WDRB reported.
Cosby referred to an infamous comment Biden made while on the campaign trail with Charlamagne tha God on “The Breakfast Club.” Charlamagne told Biden that he should come to the studio in New York City for another interview, saying, “we’ve got more questions.”
“You’ve got more questions?” Biden replied. “Well I tell you what, if you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.”
Cosby tweeted, “Funding Falls From $45 Billion to $2 Billion Under Latest Biden Spending Plan Remember, ‘You ain’t black if you don’t vote for me.'”
Cosby later tweeted, “Biden-Harris would not be in office if it were not for the black vote. We voted 92% for the Dems. When it comes to delivering tangibles for us, they always underperform. They mistreat us yet we continue to vote 4 them while saying, ‘thank you sir, may I have another?'”
Some Twitter users saw the Democrats as the better of two evils. Marvin Wes t@GodsChosenOne80 tweeted, “Republicans should seize the opportunity and ask for funding back but they don’t care about our vote at all! If they did this, they would win the midterms in a landslide!”
Cosby referred to Biden’s State of the Union address, in which the president said the reason HBCUs are behind is that HBCUs don’t have endowments. “The reason HBCUs don’t have endowment is because Black people don’t have wealth. And that’s not our fault. We have been engineered out of wealth,” Cosby added.
According to Cosby, the country’s top 10 HBCUs have “maybe $2 billion” in endowment funds. By comparison, the top 10 white institutions have more than $200 billion in endowments, he told WDRB. “So how do you make bricks without straw?”
He continued. “If it was just Simmons, then we can say that there’s something Simmons is doing wrong. But if it’s every Black college in America, then America needs to say, perhaps, what are we doing wrong?”
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