Between 1921 and 1948, every Southern and border state, except Delaware, set up scholarship programs to send Black students out of state for graduate study rather than admit them to historically white public colleges or build graduate programs in the public HBCUs. While the individual Black students often benefited from graduate education at top-tier universities, the segregation scholarships created hardships for those same students and took money that could have been used to build up the public HBCUs. Joining me in this episode is Dr. Crystal R. Sanders, Associate Professor of African American Studies, at Emory University and author of A Forgotten Migration: Black Southerners, Segregation Scholarships, and the Debt Owed to Public HBCUs.

Our theme song is Frogs Legs Rag, composed by James Scott and performed by Kevin MacLeod, licensed under Creative Commons. The mid-episode music is “He’s a College Boy,” composed by Theodore F. Morse, with lyrics by Jack Mahoney, and performed by the American Quartet on September 3, 1910, in Camden, New Jersey; the recording is in the public domain and is available via the Library of Congress National Jukebox. The episode image is “As University of Oklahoma dean of admissions J.E. Fellows, Thurgood Marshall, ad Amos T. Hall look on, Ada Sipuel again applies for admission to the University of Oklahoma Law School in 1948;” Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

Additional Sources:

• “Segregation Scholarships,” PBS Chasing the Dream.
• “Major Landmarks in the Progress of African Americans in Higher Education,” The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education.
• “History of HBCUs,” Thurgood Marshall College Fund.
• “Reconstruction-Era Politics Shaped Historically Black Colleges and Universities,” by Leigh Soares, Progress: A Blog for American History.
• “STATE OF MISSOURI et rel. GAINES v. CANADA et al.,” Legal Information Institute, Cornell University Law School.
• “Fisher, Ada Lois Sipuel (1924-1995),” The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, Oklahoma State HIstorical Society.
• “4 decades of desegregation in American colleges, charted,” by Jeff Guo, The Washington Post, December 17, 2014.