HBCUs are underfunded. A legal effort starting in Missouri seeks to fix it

An effort to address decades of underfunding at some historically Black colleges and universities kicked off Wednesday with a lawsuit against the state of Missouri.

Students and graduates of Lincoln University in the state’s capital of Jefferson City allege the lack of financial resources undercut their education and devalued their degrees.

More than a dozen other states are in the crosshairs of a newly formed group called the 1890 Project.

“It is very unfortunate that we still live in a climate where, depending on the color of one’s skin, one gets precedence over the other,” said Lincoln graduate Jeanneth Johnson, a 54-year-old from the Detroit suburb of Sterling Heights, who is a plaintiff in the lawsuit.

The University of Missouri system and the governor’s office both said in written statements that they couldn’t comment on pending litigation.

Back in 2023, the administration of then-President Joe Biden found HBCUs in 16 states had missed out on $12.6 billion in funding over the last three decades. The finding and an ensuing call for the governors in those states to boost spending came one year after members of Congress also raised concerns.

At issue is the funding of land-grant universities. The first batch was established in 1862 under the Morrill Act, which gave public lands to states to pay for colleges that focused on educating students in practical fields like agriculture and engineering.

It was a departure from traditional colleges at the time, which focused mostly on classical subjects for the elite, such as Latin, Greek, philosophy and theology. But the law’s namesake, Justin Smith Morrill, a senator from Vermont, believed higher education should be accessible to all social classes.

In the wake of the Civil War, Morrill, an abolitionist, called for an update to the act. Passed in 1890, the new law required states either to open their land grants to students of all races or establish separate land grant schools for Black students.

Missouri, a border state that allowed slavery but fought with the Union during the Civil War, wasn’t about to open its flagship University of Missouri campus in Columbia to Black students. To meet the new requirement, it looked toward what was then called Lincoln Institute, which a Black Union Army unit started at the end of the war by pooling their wages.

Seventeen other mostly former Confederate states and border states established 18 other land grant schools for Black students. They included Tuskegee University, the only private 1890 land grant.

Federal law requires an equitable distribution of state funding for all of a state's land-grant universities — whether HBCU or otherwise. But the 2023 Biden administration analysis found that only two states funded traditional and HBCU land-grants equitably — Delaware and Ohio. Lincoln University alone was underfunded by $361 million from 1987 through 2020, the newly filed lawsuit says, citing federal numbers.

Today, Lincoln’s enrollment has fallen to around 2,200 students, down from around 3,400 in 2011 and just a fraction of the approximately 32,000 enrolled on the University of Missouri’s Columbia campus, which was roiled by protests in 2015 over racial injustice, leading to the resignation of two top administrators.

“We’re not saying they should be funded equally, but they should be funded on parity,” said Don Calloway, a former Missouri state lawmaker who leads the 1890 Project. “And the feds funded Lincoln with the proper parity. The problem is that the state made an intentional choice not to match the federal appropriation. And that’s where Lincoln really was cheated.”

He blames millions in deferred maintenance on some of Lincoln's enrollment woes.

Calloway said he also is talking to state’s attorneys general in several other states, including Virginia, Arkansas, Maryland, North Carolina, Alabama and Georgia. Over the decades, lawsuits also have been filed in several of those states over underfunding of HBCUs, including one in Maryland that led to a $577 million settlement.

But those lawsuits mostly focused on state-level funding disparities between all HBCUs and non-HBCUs. There are dozens of HBCUs that aren't 1890s land grants, often started by nonprofits and religious groups. Calloway said his legal strategy is focused just on the 1890s schools.

“We expect to negotiate and/or litigate in multiple jurisdictions over the next year," he said. “Missouri is the first.”

Herbert Kitchen, a plaintiff whose great-great-grandfather, Caleb Lindsey, was one of the soldiers whose pay founded Lincoln, recalled his residence hall frequently was without heat and hot water when he was a student at Lincoln in the 1980s. Rumors were swirling that the school might close, and he said some employers looked at his degree as “second rate.”

Kitchen, a retired California community college administrator, thinks of his great-great grandfather as he fights for Lincoln, a school generations of his family have attended.

“I am," he said, “the hope and dream that my great-grandfather had when he was a slave.”

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