Thanks to Beyoncé, All Eyes Are on Black Colleges. A Historian Says They Should Capitalize on the Hype.

In a yellow hoodie bearing Greek letters with references to black colleges, Beyoncé, with a full marching band behind her resembling a hive, danced and sang to the sounds of horns, drum lines, and rhythmic whistles. At the Coachella music festival last weekend she staged a black-college homecoming.

Beyoncé was the first black woman to headline Coachella. And she thrust black colleges into the pop-culture spotlight.

Beyoncé is not the first black musician to refer to black colleges in recordings or performances. For example, the Notorious B.I.G., a rapper, referenced “Howard homecoming” on his 1997 record “Kick in the Door,” the rap and pop star Drake is known to wear black-college hoodies on stage, and the rapper Kanye West wrote a chorus that cited black Greek life in the song “School Spirit.” But when Beyoncé performs, the world watches.

Still, her performance fosters narratives of historically black colleges and universities that can be misinterpreted when heard by a wider audience, says Crystal A. deGregory, a historian and director of the Atwood Institute at Kentucky State University, an HBCU in Frankfort, Ky.

Beyoncé saw a promotional opportunity for HBCUs, she said, but now the iconic singer wants more focus on that than on the performance itself.

The Chronicle spoke with deGregory on Monday about what the performance means for public perceptions of black colleges. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q. It’s a media freakout for people reacting to Beyoncé’s use of black imagery. What’s the big deal here?

A. For members of the HBCU community, it is a source of affirmation of all that we know and love about the HBCU experience. It’s a demonstration that popular culture, whether consciously or unconsciously, values the HBCU within a historical framework. It also makes the case for our contemporary relevance and is made easier when popular culture adopts expressions of our campus cultures.

Q. Who is the affirmation for? Is it affirmation for people who don’t know about these colleges, or those who don’t care and ignore HBCUs?

A. These expressions have been a part of HBCU culture for as long as they have existed, but until there’s an event in popular culture that signals some interest, we are not seen as popular culture. I think that is a fair assessment, given that we know Beyoncé grew up in a town [Houston] that is dominated by HBCU band culture. Her father is, of course, a historically black college and university graduate, having graduated from Fisk University, where he sat on the board. So it’s not as though she’s unfamiliar with black colleges.

The point of the story here is that historically black colleges and universities have made it possible to have a Beyoncé, who is not just a dynamic entertainer on stage but a person who towers over popular music and has exemplified the very best of black business and savvy acumen. It’s not just about the cadence of her voice or the rhythmic expressions of her musicality, but rather from her mind and her heart and her spirit that relates to HBCUs.

Q. Today Beyoncé announced that she’d be donating money to HBCUs for scholarship programs. Do you think that she used her Coachella platform to call out media that don’t know about black colleges?

A. You know, you have saved me from writing the editorial that will probably result in the most clapback of my lifetime. I am more interested in those more substantive demonstrations of the value of HBCUs and HBCU culture, as expressed by the donations, than I am by, quite frankly, Beyoncé’s performance of a lifetime held on the back of HBCU culture. I wonder: Is this just entertainment?

Part of our challenge has been to encourage and to appreciate different types of giving, those of our time, of our talents, and of our treasures. In this instance, on stage, we see Beyoncé giving us time by virtue of using her talent. But the establishment of these scholarships and other gifts like it would be a true demonstration of her treasure.

If we could get her face in the place on campus in front of students, that could feed their imaginations. If they can get internships with her corporations, then we see our returns all the more multiply. That’s what the landscape needs most.

Q. What’s next? What do other stars like Beyoncé need to do if they’ve benefited from black colleges and have yet to give back?

A. I don’t think it’s unfair to ask what’s next. It’s important for her camp to acknowledge that we value our inclusion on world stages. We have the expectation that she recognizes that she is uniquely positioned to not just put our culture on the world stage, but also put our most prized products, the people, on the world stage. We should ask ourselves: Why did it take Beyoncé to tell us that we’re awesome?

This presents an opportunity to talk about the ways we’ve been undervaluing our own HBCU culture. Beyoncé has shined a light on our cultural uniqueness, and she has demonstrated that popular culture has an appetite for it. Unless HBCUs are in a better position to feed that appetite, we are going to be left hungry, either at the table or not at the table at all. Someone else is going to be serving up our culture.

Does it take Beyoncé singing and dancing on stage to an almost exclusively white audience, as the greatest entertainer of our time, for people to talk about HBCUs?

Q. This is why I wanted to talk to someone more candidly because this is what I thought about.

A. Oh, so you put me on the line.

Q. Well, you said you were going to write about this anyway.

A. No, no, no, no. Well at least now you can write about it, and I can read it and say, “Oh God.” They’ll have to get at me and my Twitter handle, and clap back.

Q. What are the ramifications here if people talk about HBCUs and popular culture without knowing the greater concerns?

A. If we talk about how her father went to Fisk University, mum’s the word. We don’t talk about how these black businesspeople went to black colleges.

I don’t want this to become a conversation about the bands and the dancers and Greek life. This has to become more than that. To me, this can be a curse that looks like a blessing.