Field Dispatches

Notes on Civic Formation at a Texas HBCU

A field journal from the Politics Lab of the James L. Farmer House at Huston-Tillotson University

Dispatch No. 01 · Spring 2026 · Robert M. Ceresa, Founding Director

Freeman

From the classroom to the State Capitol – a student, a pathway, and a capacity higher education does not score.

Like many students in my courses, I remember Freeman as a young person, looking kind of out of sorts in the classroom, as if he was trying to make sense of where he had landed as a student on a college campus – wondering exactly what he had signed up for, how to succeed, and how to have fun, all at the same time. Freeman wanted to be in the classroom, I remember thinking, but for reasons he probably didn’t really understand.

More than that, however, what stood out first about Freeman was something more basic. His attendance. It was regular even on days when campus events and activities caused other students to miss. That was the first clue. It got me thinking about him, and it made me curious. “What was it about this young man?” I thought. Then there were the occasions during class. In moments of light banter, when serious conversation was interrupted, Freeman would frequently take the opportunity to speak up and engage. The moments were not the norm, so most days, needless to say, Freeman would mostly sit quietly in class, but in a posture that signaled he was alert and listening.

Most professors cherish the opportunity to connect with students. So I became fond of Freeman, the student, and the interruptions in class when they came. At some point during the semester I began appreciating how Freeman was different. I let him know about it, telling him, “Freeman, I see something in you. Have you ever thought about leadership?”

Freeman’s response was something along the lines of “What do you mean?”

So, I pressed him, “You are setting the pace in the classroom. Students are watching. It is a real skill. I believe you should develop it. I want you to think about political science for a major and getting involved in Public Leadership.”

I don’t remember what happened next other than to say Freeman did as I suggested – he changed his major and he began participating in Public Leadership. This was during the second year of the Texas HBCU Democracy Schools Conference in the 2022–23 school year. One of the things I remember about the conference that year and about Freeman’s engagement in helping to organize it with others as part of Public Leadership was Freeman’s conviction that basketball would be how we could drive up attendance from across the nine Texas HBCUs.

In Public Leadership, when students get ideas like this, often the idea becomes an opportunity for leadership development. So, I challenged Freeman once more. “That’s an interesting idea,” I said, “and it makes perfect sense. Okay, do the homework. Exactly what is the concept? How could it work? What would it take? Would it make a difference in ways we care about?”

True to form, Freeman took the challenge.

He researched basketball programs across Texas’ HBCUs, the major tournaments and events that were associated with them. Something else he did that was brilliant was that he included intramural basketball in his calculus. Which schools did not have varsity basketball teams, but nevertheless had robust intramural programs? His thinking was about how to get all the schools involved in one way or another through basketball. I should say Freeman’s idea was for a tournament that could be played during the evenings on the conference days as a way of getting people to participate in the conference as well as watch basketball.

Freeman told me about conversations he had with Residential Life staff at Huston-Tillotson about intramural programs and gym capacity and hours on our campus. “Fantastic!” I thought, and so I wrote to the University Provost to let him know about the concept of a basketball tournament that students were exploring. From conversations with conference partners I learned they would support it.

We would start with student leaders in Public Leadership, led by Freeman, reaching out to HT’s Athletic Director for a meeting, for an opportunity to learn more. But first, Freeman went to the University’s Dean of Student Affairs to share the idea and set up a meeting of the Dean, myself, and Freeman. When we met, the Dean said she liked the idea and that she would help, and she reached out to the Athletic Director to let him know. Then I reached out to the Athletic Director myself with a formal email that explained our thinking and the role of students in Public Leadership in leading the effort.

I should fast-forward here. To date we have not had an HBCU basketball tournament during the days of the conference. There have been many meetings to discuss the idea and to bring others in. However, no dates have been established, no public commitments have been made, and no games have been played. The point of the story is not basketball, however, but Freeman’s development as a public leader. All the things Freeman did that year related to bringing a Texas HBCU basketball tournament together were remarkable – and they had impacts, on Freeman principally, but on others as well. In the process of exploring the possibilities, Freeman began stacking small win after small win and visibly growing and gaining confidence in his abilities along the way.

Freeman held meetings with HT’s Athletic Director, exchanged direct phone calls and emails. He interacted in a similar manner with HT’s Head Men’s Basketball Coach. He did the same with the Dean of Student Affairs. He had conversations with students and others in leadership roles across Texas’ HBCUs. He shared reports of his progress at meetings with other student leaders in Public Leadership at HT. Freeman was so impressive that at some point I asked him to start attending the regular weekly meetings of faculty, administrators, and community partners that by now had formed a working group to support the conference effort. That group would become the Democracy Schools Alliance of Texas HBCUs (Alliance). Freeman was its first permanent student representative.

One thing I have learned about organizing conferences after five consecutive years is that they have many, many, many moving parts, all of which require planning, development, research, outreach, etc. Moving a mountain is how I have come to think about what organizing a conference is. The demands mean organizers cannot focus on any one element all the time. Freeman did remarkable work developing the idea of a basketball tournament, and then at some point along the way, his presence in a leadership role meant that other opportunities and challenges would emerge that would require his attention. Freeman would step forward time and again, and it wasn’t long before students and others, including myself, were looking to Freeman for leadership in many areas.

One of the areas Freeman excelled in was the legislative work related to the idea for a legislative caucus of HBCUs in Texas, which students had developed. Students and the Alliance envisioned the caucus as a vehicle for sustained, focused work devoted to HBCUs between sessions of the Texas Legislature. Legislative work is its own animal, and it is astonishing just how much of it comes down to personal relationships with lawmakers and their staffs and to regular, consistent follow-up and feedback on the issues one cares about. The work benefits from performance of one important skill in particular, which, as it happens, Freeman has in abundance – relational emotional intelligence. The very skill that drew me to Freeman as a student in the classroom would make Freeman a favorite of people at the State Capitol.

Relational emotional intelligence, exercised in real time, is the ability to read the emotional weather of the people in a room and adjust one’s own contribution so that people can hold together across whatever differences are in the air. It is the capacity to know when to speak so that the conversation deepens rather than fractures; when to sit alert and let someone else find their footing; when to offer the small reassurance that lets a half-formed thought get all the way out into the open; and when to make a small adjustment that lets a person who has gone quiet for reasons that matter come back in.

In civic architecture, relational emotional intelligence is the capacity, in persons, that lets institutional life actually function as institutional life rather than as a series of disconnected interactions. It is not soft skill. It is not personality. It is not charisma.

The Apprentice/Associate/Author pathway of Public Leadership is built, in part, as an attempt to score this skill. The pathway’s evaluation structure puts the assessment of relational emotional intelligence into the hands of people who have watched students in actual rooms over time: the faculty advisor who works with the student week after week, the faculty and staff allies who see the student in collateral institutional settings, and the community and organizational leaders and alumni who have worked with the student on actual public-facing efforts. The weighting (faculty advisor 70%, allies 15%, community/alumni 15%) reflects the judgment that relational emotional intelligence is a capacity best assessed by people who have observed it under real conditions, in real institutional life, over real time.

Relational emotional intelligence is not a new concept. The idea has a long lineage in the Black freedom tradition. It is also a capacity at the heart of the broad-based community organizing tradition the Industrial Areas Foundation has practiced for eighty years. It is part of the inheritance Public Leadership was built to carry forward. Relational emotional intelligence is what makes a relational meeting in the Industrial Areas Foundation tradition succeed or fail, what makes a Citizenship School like the ones Septima Clark and Bernice Robinson built work, what made Ella Baker – by the testimony of the Mississippi organizers Charles Payne quotes – able to “draw people out.” It is the pastoral capacity that Reverend King brought to the rooms where the movement’s strategic decisions were made, beyond the oratory. It is what the Black church has always called the gift of knowing the spiritual condition of a congregation in the moment.

Unfortunately, relational emotional intelligence is something American higher education does not know how to recognize, does not know how to score, and does not know how to develop. Grade-point average measures one kind of capacity (the ability to absorb and reproduce propositional knowledge under timed conditions), but not relational emotional intelligence. Standardized tests measure another (the ability to reason in decontextualized scenarios). Neither one measures the capacity to be good in a room with other people working toward a shared end. That capacity shows up in moments of judgment that resist standardization. It can be observed only by people who have watched the student in actual rooms over time. It cannot be assessed by a rubric administered at a single sitting. The skill that Freeman has in abundance is one that the transcript most colleges produce for their students cannot capture. Students like Freeman often pass through higher education institutions without anyone with institutional authority noticing what they have, much less giving them a pathway through which what they have can become institutionally consequential.

Freeman’s progression through Public Leadership – from a student I noticed in the classroom because his attendance was steady and his interruptions deepened the conversation, to a student who could carry the basketball-tournament concept across multiple institutional conversations and emerge with relationships at every level he touched, to a student who would become a favorite of lawmakers and their staffs at the State Capitol – is the trajectory of a relational emotional intelligence given the institutional pathway through which it could become consequential. Without the pathway, the capacity might have stayed where higher education usually leaves capacities like this: latent, unscored, ungranted standing.

With the pathway, Freeman became Student Director of the Texas HBCU Legislative Caucus. He became a co-contact on House Bill 3296. He became the first permanent student representative of the Democracy Schools Alliance of Texas HBCUs working group. He became, in the language of Public Leadership, an Author – a student exercising shared governance with civic responsibility, mentoring earlier-stage students, representing the program to external stakeholders with integrity. The institutional outcomes of his work are documented in legislative records, press coverage, and the institutional archives of the Farmer House. The capacity that made the outcomes possible – the relational emotional intelligence that the standard institutions of higher education had no way to recognize – is what civic architecture, as a framework and as a practice, exists to honor.

Published with the consent of Freeman Crawford IV. Freeman reviewed this draft and signed off on the public account of his story. He may request changes or removal at any time.

The Farmer House Field Dispatches are an institutional record of the civic-formation work of the Politics Lab of the James L. Farmer House at Huston-Tillotson University. The framework named here – civic architecture – is developed at length in the manuscript Civic Architecture: Compacts, Brokens, and the Reconstruction of Democratic Life in America (in preparation, 2026).

The term relational emotional intelligence here draws on the emotional and social intelligence literatures (Salovey, Mayer, Goleman, Gardner) while rooting the capacity in the Black freedom tradition (Clark, Robinson, Baker, Payne) and broad-based community organizing (Alinsky, Chambers).

Read about the Lab at htu.edu/farmerhouse. Inquiries to rmceresa@htu.edu.