“You’ve been favoring whiteness for nearly a century and a half. Right? So now you got to do it for Black people.” Â State-run land grant HBCUs have missed out on $13 billion in the last three decades. Wypipologist Michael Harriot explains how this happened, how long it’s been going on, and what he thinks should be done to repair the damage.
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Michael Harriot: [00:00:00] On September 18th, the Biden administration notified 16 governors across the country. of their part in a 13 billion dollar heist. What am I talking about? Well, that’s why I want to welcome you to theGrio Daily. The only podcast that’ll explain how America illegally looted HBCU.
Maybe you’ve heard about this, or maybe you haven’t cause you know, most mainstream so-called outlets. don’t give you stories about what happened to Black people, but on September 18th in joint letters to Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, [00:01:00] Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia, the USDA’s Secretary, uh, Miguel Cardona, and Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack, wrote a letter to all of those governors demanding that they basically stop stealing money from HBCUs.
Specifically, they were talking about land grant HBCUs and what they’ve been doing for a 130-something years, is taking the money that is supposed to go to HBCUs, these land grant HBCUs, and basically just giving them to white colleges. So what these letters said is that basically, all these colleges have been denied money that was supposed to be given to them.
Now, let me explain how this went down, right? So first we gotta go back into some history. So in 1862, Congress passed this piece of legislation called the Morrill Act, and what the Morrill Act did was steal [00:02:00] 10.7 millions of acres from 245 Native American tribal nations. And how they did it is they just broke treaties that the U.S. government had signed with these tribal nations. And they gave like 300,000 acres a piece to each state to create these… what they called land grant colleges. They gave, they granted land to colleges. Easy to understand, right? But that was in 1862 and we were in this little white supremacist insurrection called the Civil War.
So the southern states, you know, they didn’t get any of that, that land. So in 1890 Congress passed the second Morrill Act. Well, It basically did the same thing, but instead of the Northern Colleges, it did it for the Confederate States, you know, the white supremacist states, you know, the South. And when the government gave this land and this money to the states, they made two specifications that are important for us to remember.
[00:03:00] One, they said you couldn’t discriminate between Black students and white students. And two, that, like, we’re going to give you this land, we’re going to give you the initial funding, but from now on, whatever you give to your white colleges that get some of this land, you got to give it to the Black colleges, right?
And so what the southern states did, and, and this is important to know, so this was before Plessy versus Ferguson, the Supreme Court decision that determined that separate but equal was legal. So what this legislation did was allow the southern states to just like say we’re gonna segregate our colleges.
And this was illegal then now, right? Because separate but equal hadn’t even gone into effect, but you know. It’s Black people, the government don’t care. But, again, it’s stipulated. Like, look, if you’re gonna create these segregated institutions, you still gotta give the Black colleges the [00:04:00] same amount of money that you give the white colleges.
Well, to create… these land grant institutions, they made flagship white institutions. You might have heard some of them, uh, for instance, Auburn University in Alabama, um, the University of Georgia, you know, places where people got real good football teams in the south. And they also created Black land grant colleges.
Places like Tuskegee, Fort Valley State, Alabama A&M, Florida A&M. These were land grant colleges that were specifically designated to teach people about agriculture, science, research. And again, they were supposed to be funded equally. That never happened. Right. They created these huge land grant colleges for white people, and they gave some money to Black colleges after the initial funding.
Right. So in some [00:05:00] years, the HBCUs wouldn’t get any money. In all of the years, there is not a single. land grant HBCU that was equally funded, uh, as much as his white counterpart. So again, this funding in a, in a statewide, when a state determines its higher education funding, it doesn’t say we’re going to give this much to the Black colleges.
We’re going to give this much to the white colleges, but they do is this, they just set an amount to give and then they split it among the colleges, how they see fit. In some states, they do it per student, but in the cases of HBCUs, some years, they didn’t give the HBCUs any money. So what the Biden administration did, the USDA, which was over this, these land grant colleges, they went back and looked.
Now, they didn’t go back to 1890. They only went back to 1987 and determined that the amount that these 16 states has shorted these [00:06:00] HBCUs was $13,055,622,325. About 816, 000, 000 per institution. Again, they didn’t just short the HBCUs, they took that money that they were supposed to give to the Black colleges and gave them to the white colleges.
That is a crime. It was illegal by law. But, what good is a law If you never enforce it. Well, when you see these students at HBCUs, for instance, protesting the despicable conditions of their dorm, that is because when HBCUs don’t have money, they do what they call deferred maintenance. They’ll put off rebuilding a dorm or building up a new dorm or expanding the campus.
They’ll defer that in favor of, for instance, paying faculty. Um, maintaining the stuff that is necessary to keep those schools [00:07:00] open, they will defer the maintenance. And the reason for this deferred maintenance is because they weren’t funded equally. And a lot of the problems that you see with these land grant HBCUs, and it’s not just land grant HBCUs, but the federal government is only in charge of land grant HBCUs, but this issue has been throughout the HBCU, especially public HBCU funding.
What this does is a number of things, right? So you can talk about deferred maintenance and the conditions of the dorms, but the theft goes even deeper. For instance, think about all of the Black families who mortgage homes so their kids and their loved ones could attend colleges when those colleges might’ve been able to offer them scholarships.
If they had had their correct funding, think about how large those endowments would have been if those colleges would have been funded correctly and [00:08:00] could have had, you know, larger alumni bodies and graduated more people. Think about how many Black people would have been third and fourth-generation college graduates instead of first-generation, if not for this theft. Think about, um, again, those dorm rooms. Think about, for instance, you know, that that total of 13 billion doesn’t even measure, doesn’t even account for how much interest would have accrued or how much present-day value those dollars would have had.
So, when you build, uh, for instance, a library in 1978 for 2 million dollars, that library might cost 8 million dollars in 2020. But you don’t have to build it again. If you would have gotten those funds back then, not only wouldn’t you have had to build it again, right? But the value of those dollars means that you wouldn’t have to put more money into it than you [00:09:00] had in the past when, you know, raw labor and, and natural resources were cheaper. For instance, you know, again, building, uh, a science center, uh, investing in technology. All of that money was stolen and not just stolen, but given to historically white colleges, right? And that is theft. I talked to John Wilson, who was the former president of Morehouse University.
And he called it a crime. You know, he analogized it to a fire, right? Like we think about the fire, but not the smoke damage. And what’s the smoke damages, right? Not just the money, but think about the health implications. We know that people who are more educated live healthier lives. They have fewer health problems.
There could have been more doctors, um, more lawyers, so there might have been, you know, less police brutality or more, [00:10:00] more Dr. Suk lawyers who could fight police brutality. This has all kinds of implications and that is because of that initial fire, that theft. All Black people were subjected to, and all white people benefited from, right?
Because they got to live in these segregated neighborhoods with well-educated populaces. Even if they didn’t attend these colleges, they had the opportunity to, right? They paid lower taxes because their tax dollars weren’t going to fund… the white university because they was just stealing it from the Black people.
So, this is a historically white heist. Well, how do we fix it? Well, you can’t fix it by being colorblind now. You can’t fix it by race-neutral policies. You can’t fix it by ending affirmative action. You got to give Black people their money and you got to give it to make it, you know, proportional. You got to go back all 137 years and [00:11:00] give Black people their money that they have been missing. You can’t just say we’re going to fix it going forward because you already robbed them for 130-something years. Right? So you got to give them money disproportionately. You can’t be race-neutral neutral because you’ve been raised neutral for almost a century and a half, right?
Or not even race-neutral. You’ve been favoring whiteness for nearly a century and a half. Right? So now you got to do it for Black people. Now you got to fund those HBCUs. At higher proportions to make up for what you’ve stolen for them, right? You can’t just ask like private entities to invest. This is something that the government has got to fix because the government, the state governments did it and the federal government allowed it to happen.
It’s not like, like Biden was ruffling through some papers and noticed this. Black people have been complaining about this, uh, for years. The state of Tennessee and the state of Mississippi even sued and courts [00:12:00] acknowledged this theft years ago. And the state still hadn’t corrected it, or you could just give reparations like this is what reparations are about, not just the unpaid paid debt of slavery, but for the history of the economic disenfranchisement of Black people that has been benefiting whites.
And it’s not like white people are going to have to pay for it. We’re all going to have to pay for it. That’s how a country works. That’s how an economy works. That’s how society works. All Americans are going to have to repay this debt. The government isn’t like some arbitrary, separate institution. It’s all of us.
And all of us have been standing by and watching this theft. And all of us… are going to have to fix it. That’s what a government is and a democracy. And that is why you got to listen to this podcast. That’s why you got to tell your friends about it. That’s why you got to [00:13:00] subscribe. And that’s why you got to download theGrio app.
And that’s also why we leave you every episode with a Black saying. And today’s Black saying is, if they’ll lie, then they’ll steal. And if they’ll steal, they’ll kill. And if they do all of that, then it must be America. We’ll see you next time on theGrio Daily. If
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Michael Harriot is an economist, cultural critic and championship-level Spades player. His New York Times bestseller Black AF History: The Unwhitewashed Story of America is available everywhere books are sold.
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