March 16 (UPI) — Vice President Kamala Harris announced grant funds on Wednesday to aid over a third of historically Black colleges and universities that have had bomb scares since early January, including repeated threats.
Harris, who is a Howard University alumna and first graduate of an HBCU to become the vice president of the United States, delivered the remarks at a White House event on public safety.
“We gather united against violence and against intimidation,” Harris said. “Every American should be able to learn, work, worship and gather without fear. It is our duty to do everything we can to protect all our communities. Harm against any one of our communities is a harm against all of us.”
More than 80 anonymous bomb threats have been issued against dozens of majority-Black faith and educational institutions, Harris said.
“These threats have brought fear and anxiety to places of peace,” she added.
The grant funds will come from the U.S. Department of Education’s Project School Emergency Response to Violence (Project SERV) program, a White House statement on the event said.
HBCUs that have received disruptive bomb threats can use the money to hire mental health professionals, enhance campus security and provide specialized training to security staff, Harris continued.
Project SERV provides limited short-term funding to schools that have experienced traumatic incidents to assist in restoring a safe environment conducive to learning, according to the education department’s statement on the grant funds for the impacted HBCUs.
Typical awards under the program range from $50,000 to $150,000 per school.
No explosive devices have been found, but the recent and repeated bomb threats have disrupted learning, diverted critical resources to emergency responses and increased burden on campus mental health systems, according to the White House statement.
HBCUs were founded to educate Black people in the Jim Crow era, when Black people were terrorized by White supremacist mob lynching incidents, especially in the South, and refused entry into other colleges due to racial discrimination.
Attorney General Merrick Garland also spoke at the event, citing a deadly shooting spree that killed eight people in Atlanta exactly one year ago. Six of the victims were Asian.
“Allow me to be very clear: At the Justice Department we believe the time to address illegal threats is when they are made, not after tragedy strikes,” Garland said.
U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said in a statement ahead of the event that the recent bomb threats at HBCUS “have shaken students and fractured their sense of safety and belonging.”
“We, at the Department of Education, recognize how these threats evoke a painful history of violence against Black Americans in this country that is especially traumatizing to HBCU students, faculty, and staff,” Cardona continued.
“Today’s announcement will improve access to Project SERV grants for HBCUs as these institutions work to address students’ mental health needs, shore up campus security, and restore learning environments so that they can get back to doing what they do best — educating the next generation of great leaders.”
Last month, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin called for emergency aid from state lawmakers as bomb threats to HBCU’s across the country recently hit his state.
Bomb threats have targeted 57 institutions, including HBCUs, houses of worship, and other faith-based and academic institutions across the nation from Jan. 4 to Feb. 16, according to an FBI update on the matter last month.
The FBI began its ongoing investigation of the bomb scares as “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremism and hate crimes,” earlier this year.
Several HBCUs have received bomb threats multiple times this year, with Spelman College in Atlanta, Ga., and Howard University in Washington, D.C., being among them.
11 Alive released a recording of the first of at least three bomb threats Spelman received.
“I picked this school, university because of this reason, there are too many Black students in it,” the caller said in the recording.
Howard University has been targeted on at least four occasions in recent months.
The Department of Homeland Security warned last month of a heightened threat of domestic and foreign terrorism following recent bomb threats to HBCUs and a hostage incident at a synagogue in Texas the prior month.
The FBI identified six juveniles as persons of interest in the series of HBCU bomb threats last month, but a law enforcement official later told CNN no arrests had been made.
NBC News, which first reported the issue, described the juveniles as “tech savvy.”
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.