The History of Segregation Scholarships
In July 2022, just days after Americans celebrated Independence Day, President Joseph Biden presented the Presidential Medal of Freedom to seventeen men and women for their selfless contributions to the United States and the world. Among the honorees was civil rights attorney Fred Gray. President Biden remarked, “When Dr. King, Rosa Parks, and Claudette Colvin, and John Lewis, and other giants of our history needed a lawyer for their fight for freedom, you know who they called? They called a guy named Fred Gray. That’s who they called. One of the most important civil rights lawyers in our history, Fred’s legal brilliance and strategy desegregated schools and secured the right to vote.”
While Fred Gray certainly played an integral role in some of the most important court battles in American history, segregation made obtaining legal training anything but easy for him. Gray was born in Montgomery, Alabama, the cradle of the Confederacy, in 1930. He wanted to attend law school after graduating from Alabama State College for Negroes in 1951, but there was one problem: Alabama did not have any law schools that admitted African Americans. The state’s sole public law school, at the University of Alabama, admitted white students only. In fact, Alabama did not offer any in-state postbaccalaureate programs to African Americans.
To feign compliance with the legal doctrine of separate but equal, beginning in 1945, the state of Alabama paid for its Black residents to go out of state to pursue postbaccalaureate degree programs that were available in state to white residents. The state paid the difference between the tuition and housing costs at schools where Black Alabamians studied and those at the University of Alabama. There was a catch, however. The state’s tuition assistance program operated on a reimbursement basis, so students had to come up with the financial resources for out-of-state study upfront and receive reimbursement later. With the support of family and friends, Gray secured the necessary funds and matriculated at Western Reserve University Law School (present-day Case Western University School of Law) in Cleveland, Ohio, where he studied from 1951 until 1954. Though he and his relatives paid taxes to support graduate and professional school programs at the University of Alabama, segregation compelled him to leave Alabama and study elsewhere.
Recalling his decision to leave the state in pursuit of a legal career, Gray reminisced, “Privately, I pledged that I would return to Montgomery and use the law to destroy everything segregated that I could find. I kept my plans secret. I did not want anything to interfere with my going to law school.” After arriving in Cleveland on a segregated train, he kept thinking of Alabama, where he planned to practice law. Gray asked the law librarian to procure for him a copy of Title 7 of the Alabama Code, which was the section on pleadings and practice. He developed a methodical study plan to learn Alabama’s statutes. As he later explained,
Immediately after class, one of the other African American students and I would stop by the dining facility and have lunch. I would return to the house in the afternoon, review and type up my notes. I would ascertain for each point of law that we covered whether Alabama followed or departed from the same principle. If it differed, I found out what the Alabama rule was and committed it to memory. Then I would prepare for my next day’s classes. As further preparation for returning to Alabama, whenever we had legal research papers, I would always do my paper on some facet of Alabama law.
Had Alabama admitted Black students to its law school, Gray would not have had to go out of his way to add Alabama laws to his law school curriculum. Segregation put him at a disadvantage, but he found ways to overcome the professional handicap. Gray would go on to be a nationally known attorney who used his knowledge of the law to overturn Black voter dilution and dismantle racial segregation in various arenas. He represented Rosa Parks when she refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery city bus. He also represented the men and their families involved in the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study and filed the lawsuits that integrated all state institutions of higher learning in Alabama and 104 of the then 121 elementary and secondary school systems in the state.
Fred Gray was one of the thousands of Black Southerners who took advantage of what I call “segregation scholarships” to pursue postbaccalaureate study in the North, Midwest, or West because their native state flagship institutions denied them admission on the basis of race. I refer to the funds these states appropriated for Black citizens’ graduate and professional school training as “segregation scholarships” because the entire point of the tuition assistance was to preserve segregation. Missouri introduced the idea of appropriating money to send Black citizens out of state for graduate training in 1921 and finally allocated funds eight years later. In subsequent years, West Virginia (1927), Maryland (1935), Oklahoma (1935), Kentucky (1936), Virginia (1936), Tennessee (1937), North Carolina (1939), Texas (1939), Arkansas (1943), Georgia (1944), Alabama (1945), Florida (1945), Louisiana (1946), South Carolina (1946), and Mississippi (1948) set up their own systems of providing scholarships to Black students to study out of state to preserve segregation. Many of these states paid for their segregation scholarship programs by taking money from their already underfunded public Black colleges. Most states referred to the tuition assistance as “out-of-state tuition aid,” obscuring its true purpose. The states with the largest Black populations were the last to create segregation scholarships for the graduate and professional education of Black citizens. The only Southern or border state that made no graduate provision for its Black residents was Delaware.
Most students receiving funds studied at midwestern flagships or private universities in the Northeast. Segregation scholarships were inadequate and failed to fulfill states’ constitutional obligation to ensure equal protection under the law for all residents. Fred Gray recalled experiencing money crises throughout his law school career. He paid his fees on installment but “still owed money when the time came to take final exams.” Thankfully, school officials allowed him to take exams despite his debt. Financial straits were common among segregation scholarship recipients because Southern states provided paltry tuition assistance. For example, Texas spent about $1,500 per year for every white student educated at the University of Texas School of Dentistry, but the largest segregation scholarship that a Black Texan could receive to study dentistry out of state was $400. For medical school students, the numbers were $1,900 and $500, respectively.
While more than 100 public and private Black colleges existed in the South to educate students that white colleges excluded, training beyond the bachelor’s degree was almost impossible. Before 1936, there were only 7 schools in the region — all private institutions — where African Americans could pursue graduate or professional school study: Howard University, Hampton Institute, Fisk University, Meharry Medical College, Gammon Theological Seminary, Atlanta University, and Xavier University. Graduate offerings at these institutions were limited. For example, graduate work at Hampton was only possible in education, and the courses were offered during the summer session only.
Even after 1936, postbaccalaureate opportunities at Black institutions, public or private, were rare. No Black institution conferred the PhD until 1955. While non-Black students could pursue master’s, doctorate, and professional degrees at state-supported flagship institutions in the South, Black students remained shut out of these schools because of racism. Charles Hamilton Houston, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s (NAACP) special counsel in the midthirties, recognized that “graduate schools were an area where the South was most vulnerable.”
Given African American Southerners’ lack of opportunity for study beyond the bachelor’s degree, Houston made lawsuits seeking the desegregation of public graduate and professional schools a priority. He envisioned successful suits forcing Southern white officials to either admit Black applicants to flagship institutions or establish separate and equal facilities at public Black colleges. Houston did not believe the latter was possible since Southern states could not afford equal facilities. While correct that schools that were separate could not be equal, the civil rights attorney did not anticipate region-wide use of segregation scholarship programs.
Houston expected to easily find plaintiffs willing to pursue equality suits to desegregate Southern flagship institutions because Black demand for graduate and professional education increased significantly in the 1930s and 1940s. The call for additional training was a natural response to increased Black student college enrollment in the first half of the twentieth century. Black college enrollment jumped from 5,231 in 1922 to 22,609 in 1932. In the six years before World War II, 30,000 African Americans graduated from college and professional school, a figure that “was as many as in the entire previous period of American history.”
While several ambitious Black plaintiffs would challenge their exclusion from state universities between 1933 and 1950, thousands of Black Southerners secured advanced study with segregation scholarships. By pursuing their highest scholarly potential and obtaining master’s, doctorate, and professional degrees, African Americans equipped themselves with the credentials to serve the race as physicians, attorneys, pharmacists, professors, teachers, and principals. The additional training and degrees oftentimes led to higher salaries and white-collar jobs, but these benefits came at a cost. Black Southerners endured long and tedious commutes, financial hardship, racial discrimination, isolation, and homesickness while studying out of state.
The educational migration of Black scholars is hidden in the shadows of scholarship on the Great Migration that involved 6 million African Americans between 1915 and 1970. Both migrations, the “great” one and the lesser-known education one, stemmed from African Americans’ desire for a better life, and both exoduses altered Black life and America’s cities North and South. There were, however, key differences between the two. First, those who participated in the Great Migration oftentimes did so under the cover of darkness because Southern officials did not support a mass exodus of Black workers out of the region. In contrast, with the little-known educational migration, Southern and border state officials encouraged Black students to leave the state for education and subsidized their travel, not only because state-supported graduate programs did not exist but also because educated African Americans were a threat to the racial status quo. Second, the Great Migration and the lesser-known educational migration are different in that most participants in the former movement relocated permanently, while the majority of those in the latter returned to the South after earning their degrees. Thus, this is a narrative not of brain drain but of Black aspiration so resolute that thousands of scholars relocated to unfamiliar terrain and acquired new skills and credentials that they brought back to the very region that denied them educational opportunity.
Segregation scholarships recipients literally remade the academy. Virginia paid for Helen G. Edmonds to study history at Ohio State University, where in 1946 she became the first Black woman to receive a history PhD at the institution and the third Black woman to earn a doctorate there. Edmonds served on the faculty at North Carolina College (present-day North Carolina Central University) from 1941 until 1977 where she rose to the rank of professor and served as chair of the history program and dean of the graduate school. Edmonds’ first book, The Negro and Fusion Politics in North Carolina, 1894–1901, provides one of the earliest accurate accounts of the 1898 coup d’état in Wilmington, North Carolina. A scholar and an institution builder, she helped to establish the institution’s graduate program in history, which today ranks first among historically Black colleges and universities in the number of graduates who go on to earn doctorate degrees in history. Her version of intellectual warfare consisted of creating a pipeline of well-trained Black historians who remade the historical profession by challenging anti-Black ideas in the discipline.
To keep African Americans out of Louisiana State University, lawmakers paid Jewel Limar Prestage $375 per semester to pursue graduate study in political science at the University of Iowa. In 1954, at the age of twenty-two, Prestage became the first African American woman in the United States to earn a PhD in political science. She pioneered scholarship on African American women legislators and mentored nearly fifty Black students who went on to earn doctorate degrees in political science during her tenure on the faculty at Southern University of Baton Rouge and Prairie View A&M University. She also served as a dean at both institutions. Like Edmonds, Prestage used her educational opportunity to create opportunities for successive generations of political scientists and in the process made the academy much more inclusive and diverse.
Segregation scholarship recipients who pursued professional study also wielded their education as a weapon for good. U.W. Clemon, a segregation scholarship recipient from Alabama, became that state’s first Black federal judge. Before ascending to the bench, he sued renowned University of Alabama head football coach Paul “Bear” Bryant to desegregate the university’s football program. Louis Sullivan used a segregation scholarship from Georgia to attend medical school and later founded the Morehouse School of Medicine, whose mission is to improve the health and well-being of communities with an emphasis on people of color. Segregation scholarship recipients, through their academic and professional achievements, exploited their state-subsidized educations to dismantle racial segregation and expand opportunity for future generations of African Americans.
From A Forgotten Migration: Black Southerners, Segregation Scholarships, and the Debt Owed to Public HBCUs by Crystal R. Sanders. Copyright © 2024 by Crystal R. Sanders. Published by the University of North Carolina Press. Used by permission of the publisher.
