Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America

by Ijeoma Oluo

In 1890, Morrill sponsored a bill to increase funding to land-grant colleges. The bill specified that states would be denied the money for their institutions if they discriminated against African Americans in their admissions. In order to make this provision a little more palatable in the post–Civil War South, states were also given the option of educating Black Americans in separate institutions, provided that funding was “equitably divided” between Black and white institutions. While “equitably divided” was a term vague enough to allow Southern states to give a disproportionate percentage of funds to white schools, the funding did lead to the establishment of sixteen Black land-grant institutions. These HBCUs were denied the needed funding to invest in agriculture and mechanical sciences, the way white land-grant colleges had been able to, so they focused primarily on teaching future educators. The lack of investment in mechanical and scientific programs would hurt the reputations of HBCUs for decades to come and would cut them off from valuable sources of research funding through today.