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 in 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.