'Theft At A Scale That Is Unprecedented': Behind The Underfunding Of HBCUs

'Tennessee could owe a historically Black university more than a half-billion dollars after it withheld funding for decades. A bipartisan legislative committee determined last month that the state failed to adequately fund Tennessee State University in matched land grants going all the way back to the 1950s, costing the public university between $150 million and $544 million. Andre Perry, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who has written about Maryland's battle with inequality in public higher education, blames institutional racism for what he believes is a pervasive lack of funding at HBCUs.'