If not for FAMU, we would all be poorer

University leads the way in civil rights, professional programs, sports, history and more

TALLAHASSEE, Florida  --  If there had been no University of Chicago or University of California-Berkeley, maybe the nation would have fewer Nobel Prizes. If there had been no University of Pennsylvania or M.I.T., maybe the nation would have fewer titans of business.

But if there had been no Florida A&M University, the city of Tallahassee, the state of Florida and the nation would have been a poorer place in many ways. Because over the course of its 125 years, FAMU has been one of the nation’s leading producers of opportunity for black citizens — which has benefited us all.

FAMU was a place blacks could get a college education in the days before integration. It has been a university where blacks learned the professional skills that created a more diverse workforce. It’s been a university that helped everyone to share in the American dream.

“In a very significant way, the existence of FAMU provided the opportunity to say, ‘How wonderful could we be when everybody has the ability to compete and live equally,’ ” said Frederick Humphries, the FAMU president from 1985 to 2001. “Without a FAMU, the wherewithal in terms of human resources to make a more productive, more diverse society would not have been possible.”


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