Finally, there is a one-volume narrative that provides a narrative history scope of America's HBCUs. The book concludes that race, the Civil Rights movements, and black and white philanthropy had much affect on the development of these minority institutions. Northern white philanthropy had much to do with the start and maintenance of the nation's HBCUs from 1837 into the 1940s. Even from 1950 to 1970, HBCUs depended upon financial support of philanthropic groups, benevolent societies, and federal and state government agencies, but the survival of HBCUs became dependent mostly on their own creative responses to the changing environment of higher education. The book shows how black colleges began that arduous nineteenth-century journey, providing higher education for former slaves and their African-American descendants-as well as for other students, struggling for institutional survival most of the time, but adapted themselves to new missions and adjusted to recent and challenging developments in American higher education. Far from being just institutions of higher education, the HBCUs have helped to shape our culture and society.