Last month, the George Barrett Social Justice Program hosted Crystal Sanders, Associate Professor of African American Studies at Emory University, to discuss her new book A Forgotten Migration: Black Southerners, Segregation Scholarships, and the Debt Owed to the Public HBCUs.
Sanders detailed the history and impact of segregation scholarships in the United States on black communities from the 1920s to the 1960s. She argued that these scholarships, while working for some, denied numbers of black Americans from obtaining a higher education and is a driving factor behind the chronic underfunding of HBCUs.
What is a Segregation Scholarship?
Segregation scholarships are tuition assistance programs that states provided to black citizens for graduate and professional school training. States that had no specific graduate programs for black citizens but refused to admit them to the state schools, would provide vouchers or tuition assistance for them to go elsewhere. Sanders described this as the origin of the “forgotten migration,” a phenomenon that saw young black Americans being forced to travel hundreds or thousands of miles from home to pursue a graduate education because they could not do so in their own state.
“It was better to compel citizens to go out of state rather than build up black public colleges,” Sanders said.
She also highlighted how these scholarships carried on until the early 1960s, in direct defiance of a historic decision in the case of Gaines ex rel. v. Canada (1938). In Gaines, the Supreme Court of Missouri ruled that it was wrong for the State of Missouri to compel black residents like plaintiff Lloyd Gaines to go out of state for the same opportunities that white students could receive at home, particularly when black taxpayer dollars funded the state universities to which they were denied entry. The decision mandated that either the state had to admit Gaines or give him a functional equivalent for black citizens. Missouri did neither; it established the Lincoln University Law School as its equivalent, which was underfunded.
“Typically, what you saw southern states do is try to create or open a graduate program or an underfunded professional school and say to the court, ‘we’re making a good faith effort to comply with Gaines,’” Sanders said. “[Gaines] is a reminder that court decisions are hollow victories without enforcement.”
Sanders pointed out some circumstances where segregation scholarships benefited people such as prominent historian John Franklin, Christine King (the older sister of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.), and renowned civil rights lawyer Greg Grey. Even among these success stories, though, struggles were numerous.
“These institutions [that segregation scholarship recipients attended] did not roll out the proverbial welcome mat for them,” Sanders said.
Lastly, she revealed how the legislation behind segregation scholarships were often removed from state appropriations for the black colleges—now HBCUs. This occurred in the state of Tennessee.
“The amount of money that Tennessee spent on segregation scholarships for a little over two decades, [is] about $8 billion,” Sanders said. “$8 billion of funding the state of Tennessee stole from Tennessee State University.”
Sanders argued that HBCUs are still suffering the effects, with a history of chronic underfunding even among increased demand in the post-Affirmative Action era.
To wrap up her conversation, Sanders offered a simple solution : states calculate the costs with interests that state HBCU Universities were denied and create a way to repay that amount.
“We often see these institutions as struggling financially without understanding why they’re struggling financially, and all too often, it’s written off as poor leadership or poor governance,” Sanders said. “This is not an issue of governance, [rather], it is an issue of systemic underfunding.”