Are Black Colleges Worth Saving?

For the past 120 years, Alcorn State University, situated on a remote Mississippi campus, has been attended almost exclusively by blacks. It is typical of the nation's 47 historically black state-run colleges, most of them in the Deep South, which were founded as the stepchildren of a segregated public education system. The institutions were eventually touted as providing "separate but equal" training for blacks excluded from universities such as Ole Miss. What was missing, mostly, was equality: the schools were underfunded, understaffed and ignored, a condition that persists in varying degrees today.

Now Alcorn State (enrollment: 3,317) is at the center of a legal struggle that could have the same significance for public higher education as the hard- fought battles over school desegregation of the 1950s. A class-action suit was filed in 1975 by a group of students, parents and taxpayers who demanded that all of Mississippi's black colleges receive more money and aid to make up for the decades of neglect. The case has finally made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, and arguments will be heard next week. It marks the first time the Justices will consider how the widely embraced principles of Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark decision that desegregated public elementary and secondary schools, apply to colleges and universities.

In addition, the dispute raises a larger philosophical question: Should separate colleges that serve primarily blacks be encouraged, or is it better to push for a color-blind system of public higher education? The Justice Department had planned to argue that it might be unconstitutional to force states to bolster black colleges on an explicitly racial basis. But President Bush has long believed that black colleges play an important role; he is an honorary chairman of the United Negro College Fund, which raises money for 41 private institutions, such as Morehouse and Tuskegee, that are not part of publicly funded state systems. After heavy lobbying by presidents of black colleges, Bush personally ordered the Justice Department to amend its brief so that it supports the role of historically black colleges, public as well as private.

The confrontation comes at a time when these institutions are enjoying renewed popularity. The proportion of blacks going to college across the U.S. has declined, but public black colleges saw their enrollment climb 13.2% from 1986 to 1989. The institutions also award nearly one-third of all undergraduate degrees granted to the 1.1 million blacks who pursue postsecondary study.

Contrary to the national trends, black college enrollment in Mississippi is declining. The state's three historically black state-run schools -- Alcorn State, Jackson State and Mississippi Valley State -- educate the majority of black residents who go on to college. In 1981 the three schools graduated 1,353 students, while the predominantly white universities graduated 584 blacks. By 1990 the number of degrees granted at black schools had dropped to 935, while predominantly white schools awarded only 610. Contends Alvin O. Chambliss Jr., a Mississippi legal aid lawyer who has shepherded the plaintiffs' case from its outset: "Our black colleges are dying on the vine, and it's criminal."