In the summer of 2001, faculty leaders at Mississippi’s historically Black colleges wanted a meeting with the state’s governor, Ronnie Musgrove.[1] On the table was a proposed $503 million deal to address Mississippi’s legacy of discrimination in higher education that fell far short of the goal. The presidents of the faculty senates at Jackson State, Alcorn State, and Mississippi Valley State Universities had joined alumni and community members in the Mississippi Coalition on Black Higher Education to fight it. “[It] does not compensate for the past treatment of African Americans,” they wrote in a letter to the governor, “and the institutions which they were expected and required to attend.”
The leaders outlined an alternative vision: Alcorn, Mississippi’s second-oldest public university, should be a full-fledged land-grant on par with Mississippi State; Jackson State, a comprehensive urban university with law, communications, and urban planning programs; and Valley, a technical hub modeled after Georgia Tech.
To that point in time, Mississippi’s Black colleges had been underfunded for nearly 130 years, ever since Alcorn State had its annual appropriation slashed by the state’s “redemption” government at the end of the state’s Reconstruction era, and no single settlement could undo that history overnight. It could begin the process, though. Transformation is never impossible, but there is always a question of whether or not it will be the right transformation. The coalition had concrete objections that highlighted that tension. They flagged admissions rules that shut out half of Black applicants, faculty pay at historically Black colleges and universities, or HBCUs, that lagged behind professors at predominantly white-campuses, and they criticized how the endowment dollars would be locked away until HBCUs could recruit more white students. They expected better.
By the early 2000s, it was easy to forget that this negotiation was never a given. In 1975, Black Mississippians, led by Jake Ayers, Sr., a civil rights veteran and the father of a student at Jackson State University, filed a lawsuit against the state, charging that its three public historically Black colleges had been systematically underfunded. Their claims gained federal force in 1992, when the Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Fordice—also known as Ayers—that policies that were race-neutral on their face could preserve a segregated order. “That college attendance is by choice and not by assignment does not mean that a race-neutral admissions policy cures the constitutional violation of a dual system,” Justice Byron White wrote in the majority opinion. “In a system based on choice, student attendance is determined not simply by admissions policies, but also by many other factors.” Admissions cutoffs, program duplication rules, and funding formulas did not mention race explicitly, but in practice they maintained the same barriers and disparities that had marked the segregated era.
The decision set a new standard: States had to act to dismantle the vestiges of legal segregation in higher education, particularly around HBCUs. Things from history did not stay in the past. But in the same way students and families had to desegregate America after the Brown decisions, change after the 1992 Ayers decision wasn’t immediate.
A decade later, on the verge of a settlement, the tensions that animated the original lawsuit lingered. Peyton Prospere, the governor’s chief legal counsel, worried that some of the Black politicians, who had been criticized for supporting an incomplete settlement, were getting cold feet. “Reuben [Anderson] had a heated discussion with Isaac yesterday,” Prospere wrote to the governor in the eleventh hour. Anderson, the first Black justice on Mississippi’s Supreme Court, was trying to convince Isaac Byrd, Jr., the new lawyer for the plaintiffs, to sign the deal. “Isaac is under pressure; they are saying he is selling out. Reuben believes that Isaac is having trouble pulling the trigger.” The judge was expecting a signed agreement, he confided, but “told Reuben that if Isaac can’t step up we need to get the Congressman to do so.” Congressman Bennie Thompson, one of the original plaintiffs who had recently been elected to the U.S. Congress, had been getting those same calls.
On February 15, 2002, the state committed to spend $503 million over 17 years—$246 million for new academic programs, $75 million for capital improvements, $70 million for a public endowment, $35 million in private fundraising, and additional appropriations for summer developmental education—to improve its HBCUs. “The Settlement Agreement accomplishes a full, complete, and final resolution of this controversy,” Neal B. Biggers, Jr., the federal judge who oversaw the case, wrote in his final judgment. On paper, it was the largest higher-education desegregation remedy in U.S. history.
But the settlement terms raised thorny questions about governance, sustainability, and whose priorities would shape spending the years that followed. Administrative and faculty leaders had no seat at the table. As one former college president explained to me, the settlement was worked out between politicians—Democrat and Republican—and the Board of Trustees of Mississippi’s Institutions for Higher Learning, or IHL, the state’s higher education governing association. “I also recall that the settlement was basically what IHL had on the table from the beginning,” the president said. The institutions at the heart of the case, he argued, did not have real input.
Faculty efforts to influence the board were largely for naught as well. “The board members will not move another inch,” Prospere had warned in a letter to the governor on February 16, 2001, several months before the coalition met with him. He dashed it off first thing in the morning. And the board’s version of the settlement—a board long dominated by alumni of the state’s historically white universities—empowered it to approve programs, sign off on endowment uses, and oversee construction. The argument for such power, which was protection of taxpayer resources, was fair enough. But the original reason for the lawsuit was that those same taxpayer resources had never been fairly distributed. Now, the same board that oversaw those resources in the past would be doing so again, making the paradox plain: Black colleges had secured recognition but not representation.
This brief explores what happened next. For 17 years, IHL directed the largest investment ever made in Mississippi’s Black colleges. Some initiatives transformed campuses and expanded opportunity. Others faltered under prescriptive oversight or structural limits that the settlement never addressed. Ayers offers more than a history of one state’s struggle with segregation. It is a natural experiment in governance, a test of what happens when equity remedies are delivered without structural reform.
