As I document in my book “Jim Crow’s Pink Slip,” states recorded in their statutes, laws and budgets their commitment to racial segregation and their outlawing of qualified Black people from attending public colleges and universities. The language of these statutes was common. To this end, state legislatures created “Negro tuition scholarships” in an attempt to skirt the 14th Amendment rights of Black people and maintain their segregationist hold on public colleges and universities.
These “Negro tuition scholarships” were a segregationist tool. They were designed to maintain the states’ mandatory exclusion of Black students from undergraduate and graduate programs in public colleges and universities. This was able to happen because racial discrimination in state laws, violence and intimidation resulted in few Black people being registered to vote in border and southern states. With Black citizens denied their most basic right in a democracy — the right to vote — White people maintained control over all state and local elected and appointed offices, policy formulations and implementation, and state budget allocations and expenditures.
Many states used the exact same wording in the laws that codified the “Negro scholarships.” Maryland and Texas are one example of this. In 1938, Maryland’s state statute stated that the “Negro tuition scholarship provide scholarships for Negroes otherwise qualified for admission to the University of Maryland.” That was the exact language of the state law “Negroes otherwise qualified.” Similarly, in 1939, in House Bill No. 255, titled “Appropriations for Institutions of Higher Learning,” the Texas legislature allocated $25,000 for “scholarship aid to qualified Negro students.” To put this figure in context, from Aug. 31, 1940, to Aug. 31, 1941, Texas allocated almost five times the amount of money ($119,668) for maintenance and equipment at the University of Texas than it did for “Negro tuition scholarships.”
The commissions and task forces in the various states that controlled award of the “Negro tuition scholarships” were usually all White and occasionally had one nonvoting historically Black college/university (HBCU) faculty member, dean or president.
So, what did Black people locked out of taxpayer-funded public colleges and universities do? They established and attended public and private HBCUs. These institutions have never had racially exclusive admission policies. Black residents desiring to attend graduate or professional school could only attend HBCUs. But few HBCUs had graduate and professional school programs, most notably Howard University, Atlanta University, Fisk University and Meharry Medical College. If the HBCUs did not have their field of study, Black students were forced to leave their state of residence to attend an integrated university, usually those located in one of the northeastern or Midwestern states. “Negro tuition scholarships” were allocated for this purpose, essentially booting citizens out of their home state rather than using state funds to integrate colleges and universities.