The low immigration numbers, however, would have been even smaller without the backing of historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) in the United States.
In his book
Intellectuals in Exile: Refugee Scholars and the New School for Social Research, Claus Dieter Krohn recounts how American colleges in the 1930s were reluctant to employ scholars fleeing Nazi Germany. John Herz, a German-born Jew had earned his doctoral degree from Cologne University in Germany, studying international law and political theory. As a refugee in the U.S.,
Herz was hired as a substitute teacher for the summer at a college in Connecticut, but was told that they “wouldn’t employ [him] full time after that. One of them told [him] later – rather shamefully – that [him] being a Jew in addition to being a refugee was the reason.”
However, “in an important exception,” Krohn writes, “many of us young refugee scholars found our first teaching opportunities at black colleges.” Herz joined the staff of Howard University in 1941.