Eddie Francis bursts out laughing when he recounts his unexpected coaching debut for Southern University at New Orleans this past semester. The men's track team was planning to travel to Tennessee for a national indoor championship meet, but their part-time coach, a runner himself, couldn't accompany them because of a race he would run in Europe…

As the floodwaters drowning New Orleans recede, they may well be swamping historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) across the country as they gear up to deal with a rising tide of displaced college students in search of shelter from the storm. More than 9,100 HBCU students, plus thousands more faculty and staff, have been directly…

Colleges and universities in other parts of Louisiana and the nation are opening their doors to the 72,000 college students in the greater New Orleans area who were displaced by Hurricane Katrina. Dr. E. Joseph Savoie, Louisiana's commissioner of higher education, says the state's board of regents is making arrangements to allow the students to…

For decades three historically Black colleges and universities have called New Orleans home: (1) Southern University-New Orleans (SUNO), founded in 1956 as a branch of a system known for producing a majority of the state's Black lawyers; (2) Xavier University of Louisiana, founded in 1915 and long known for sending the most African-American…

To get some notion of how deeply scholars have been affected by Hurricane Katrina, one might look to someone like Dr. Erma Lawson, a medical sociologist from the University of North Texas. Lawson, who has coordinated the assistance efforts for the Association of Black Sociologists, has not hesitated to call on colleagues, graduate students, civil…