The Government Finally Puts a Number on the Discrimination Against Black Colleges
Some of the institutions were underfunded by billions of dollars compared with their white peers.
On Monday, the Biden administration sent letters with a clear message to 16 governors: Over the past 30 years, their states have underfunded their historically Black land-grant colleges by hundreds of millions—or, in some cases, billions—of dollars. The memos, signed by Education Secretary Miguel Cardona and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, are the first time the federal government has attempted to put a comprehensive number on the financial discrimination against these institutions.
“Unacceptable funding inequities have forced many of our nation’s distinguished Historically Black Colleges and Universities to operate with inadequate resources and delay critical investments in everything from campus infrastructure to research and development to student support services,” Cardona said in a statement. (There are more than 100 HBCUs in the nation, but just 19 of them are land-grant institutions, or colleges designated for funding under the Second Morrill Act of 1890; it is these 19 institutions whose funding the government analyzed.)
At the outset of the Civil War, in 1861, shortly after southern legislators were expelled from Congress, Senator Justin Morrill of Vermont introduced a bill to educate the American workforce. Across the country, agricultural productivity was down sharply, and Morrill believed that education was the answer. There were only a smattering of colleges in the United States at the time, and they served primarily as finishing schools for the elite. “We have schools to teach the art of manslaying,” Morrill told his colleagues, “and shall we not have schools to teach men the way to feed, clothe, and enlighten the great brotherhood of man?” His idea was for the federal government to give states land that they could sell in order to fund a college. The bill, known as the First Morrill Act, was signed into law in July 1862.
Iowa was the first state to accept the land grant, which it used to fund Iowa State University; other states followed suit. By the time each state had taken advantage of its land grant, more than 17 million acres of land—10 million of which had been expropriated from hundreds of Indigenous tribes—had been doled out under the act. The institutions rarely, if ever, enrolled Black students.
By 1890, the colleges were starting to work as intended: They were, on average, enrolling more students than non-land-grant colleges were and expanding the college-going population. But the leaders of the institutions argued that they needed more money to do their work, and Morrill agreed. “Let me urge that the land-grant colleges are American institutions, established by Congress, and, if a small pittance is needed to perfect and complete their organization … I shall confidently hope that it will be granted without reluctance and with the full faith in the national benefits that cannot fail to accrue,” Morrill said.
He proposed a Second Morrill Act—one that came with a caveat: States could not receive funds to support a college that made a “distinction of race and color” in admitting students; states could, however, operate a separate but equal college for Black students. The bill was signed into law on August 30, 1890. Most southern states chose the separate-but-equal route; other states, like Iowa, where George Washington Carver enrolled at Iowa State University as its first Black student, in 1891, admitted Black students to their already established land grants.
Within two decades, however, it was clear that the states were shirking their duty to the equal part of separate but equal. On February 5, 1914, senators convened to discuss a sharp disparity among land-grant colleges. Wesley Jones, a Republican from Washington, had gathered data on the differences between the white land grants and the Black land grants. Georgia, Jones told his colleagues, was a prime example of the disparity in funding. There were 423 students at the white land grant—the University of Georgia—and 568 at the one for Black students, Savannah State College, but the University of Georgia’s funding far outpaced that of Savannah State. The government had provided UGA with $249,656—$50,287 of that coming from the federal land grant—whereas Savannah State had received just $24,667, with $8,000 coming from the federal government.
“Does that mean that they were trying to teach 500 colored students on $24,000 and 400 white students on $240,000, in round numbers?” Senator Albert B. Cummins of Iowa asked Jones during floor debate. “That seems to me a very startling disparity.”
The very least the government could do, Jones argued, would be to require states to report how they spent their money, and he introduced legislation to make it so. But southern senators thought that went too far. The measure was voted down. Time passed. Other reports came and went, such as the Truman Commission for Higher Education and American Democracy’s analysis, which showed that no state in the union funded white and Black higher education equally—including at a rate of 42 to 1 in Kentucky. Still, it took more than a century for the federal government to finally require states to report their land-grant spending, which it did in the 2018 Farm Bill.
Cardona and Vilsack’s letters to the governors outline the exact amounts each land-grant Black college would have received from 1987 to 2020 if the institutions had been funded at the same level per student as the 1862 land grant stipulated. If Alabama A&M University had received its fair share in comparison to Auburn University, which has been dogged for decades by low enrollment figures for Black students, it would have had an additional $527 million over the period; meanwhile, Tennessee State University may have had an additional $2.1 billion if it had received an equitable share of the pie.
The land-grant colleges are not the only Black colleges that have been mistreated by state governments; each institution has many stories of unfair policies it has faced. Savannah State is no longer Georgia’s historically Black land grant—that designation now lies with Fort Valley State University—but it still must deal with the consequences of a state government that has failed to adequately fund it since its founding.
There is now a number attached to the legacy of discrimination at historically Black colleges, at least for the most recent decades. The lingering question is whether states will actually atone for it.
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