For historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), engagement is not an enhancement of their curriculum but part of their birthright. Founded in the Civil War/Reconstruction era, HBCUs had as their core mission educating freed slaves and other free black people to participate in the economy. Later, during the Jim Crow era, HBCUs educated the men and women who built black communities and dismantled segregation. Fifty years after "Brown v. Board of Education," almost every college includes cohorts of African American students, and African Americans can be found at every level of the economy and the society. But despite this progress, the black-white education attainment gap continues to widen, depriving many young African Americans of the education they need to begin productive careers, and depriving the economy of the professionals it needs to keep pace in the global economy. It is to these challenges that HBCUs' tradition of engagement now turns.