One of the few black kids in her elementary school in Waterford, Connecticut, Alversia Wade remembers being asked in fourth grade by white classmates if she liked watermelon and fried chicken.

 

So when it came time to choose a college, she decided to go to a campus where, as she put it, “I would not have to explain myself.”

 

She decided on Spelman College, where she’s now a freshman, and became part of a wave of black students choosing predominantly black universities over others, at a time of racial division and violence. “Everything happening with police brutality and Black Lives Matter,” Wade said, “pushed me to want an environment where I could talk to other students about all these things.”