By D.G. Martin

Do you remember what a “segregation scholarship” is — or was?

As explained in a new book “Black Southerners, Segregation Scholarships, and the Debt Owed to Public HBCUs,” these so-called “segregation scholarships” were an important part of efforts to maintain segregation in higher education during a time of changing rules and regulations about race.

Under the Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson” decision (1896), Southern states could provide graduate opportunities for African Americans by creating separate but equal graduate programs at tax-supported Black colleges or by admitting Black students to historically white institutions.

Most Southern states did neither. Providing separate and equal graduate programs in Black colleges would have been very expensive, way too costly to be practical.

Instead, many Southern states adopted a program of paying the added costs to Black graduate students who enrolled in a graduate program at an out-of-state institution.

The added costs could include additional transportation costs to get back and forth from the student’s home to the institution’s campus.

“A Forgotten Migration” tells the story of how and why these segregation scholarships were awarded by states in the U.S. South to Black students seeking graduate education in the pre–Brown v. Board of Education (1954) era. Under the “Plessy v. Ferguson” decision, decades earlier, Southern states could provide graduate opportunities for Blacks by creating separate but equal graduate programs at tax-supported Black colleges or by admitting Black students to historically white institutions. Most did neither and instead paid to send Black students out of state for graduate education.

The author, Crystal R. Sanders, a native of Clayton, a Robertson Scholar at Duke, PhD at Northwestern, and now an associate professor of African American Studies at Emory, tells about Black graduate students who relocated to outside the south to continue their education with segregation scholarships, revealing the many challenges they faced along the way.

Students who entered out-of-state programs endured long and tedious travel, financial hardship, racial discrimination, isolation and homesickness. With Brown decision in 1954, segregation scholarships began to wane, but the integration of graduate programs at southern public universities was slow. In telling this story, Sanders demonstrates how white efforts to preserve segregation led to the underfunding of public Black colleges, furthering racial inequality in American higher education.

Many Southern states continued to avoid establishing graduate and professional school programs at public Black institutions even after the states began desegregating their university systems.

Take for instance the case of veterinary education in North Carolina. After the civil rights office of the Department of Health Education and Welfare (HEW) found that the University of North Carolina system, composed of 11 historically white institutions and five historically Black institutions and managed by board of governors, still had vestiges of racial segregation. North Carolina’s university system pledged in 1974 not to establish any new programs that would “impede elimination of the dual system of our education” in the state.

That same year, UNC system officials announced the creation of a school of veterinary medicine. Both N.C. State University in Raleigh and the historically Black N.C. A&T State University in Greensboro submitted proposals to house the school.

To speed along higher education desegregation in the state, HEW required North Carolina officials to study the racial impact of a veterinary school on student enrollment at both institutions before deciding on a location. The study suggested that placing the vet school on the historically Black campus would bring about greater student desegregation than placing it on the historically white campus.

Unsatisfied with that study, the UNC Board of Governors contracted with consultants from Ohio State who studied both institutions and asserted that North Carolina State University was better equipped than North Carolina A&T to support the new program. Neither the consultants nor the board of governors considered that racially biased funding disparities had existed between the two institutions since their founding.

In the end, the UNC system established its school of veterinary medicine at North Carolina State, passing up the opportunity to appropriate significant resources and establish an advanced degree program at a Black university. UNC System President William Friday admitted that “the state probably does not have or would not be willing to commit the amount of money required to establish a veterinary medicine program at NCA&T.”

Sanders concludes, “When presented with an opportunity to redress racial discrimination and curricular neglect and higher education, North Carolina chose to perpetuate the status quo.

“This was not the first or the last time that state officials lacked the will to invest in graduate and professional school programs at their Black institutions.”

D.G. Martin, a retired lawyer, served as UNC-System’s vice president for public affairs and hosted PBS-NC’s North Carolina Bookwatch.