Jackson, Miss.
The new report is 400 pages and 100,000 words —
one of the bulkiest in memory — and is touted as a reaffirmation of
the importance of the nation’s historically Black colleges and
universities (HBCUs).
Further Desegregation of Higher Education in the Mississippi Delta
proposes a plan that would move Mississippi further from its racially
separatist past and into a more diverse, racially inclusive future. It
was produced as a result of one of the longest-running college
desegregation cases in the nation — Ayers v. Fordice — by the Board
of Trustees of State Institutions of Higher Learning.
James Lyons, the president of Jackson State University, one of
Mississippi’s eight HBCUs, called the study, which was released last
month, a “good foundation on which to build…. What we’ve done here
today is to reaffirm the importance of the nation’s historically
African American universities.”
Ayers v. Fordice is a twenty-three-year-old case in which the late
Jake Ayers Sr. filed a lawsuit — on behalf of his son and almost two
dozen other Black Mississippi students — that sought to end the
state’s racially motivated dual system of education. In 1992, six years
after the elder Ayers’s death, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed that
Mississippi’s dual system of education was unfair and something had to
be done about it.
One of the report’s proposals calls for putting more money into the
state’s HBCUs in an attempt to make them more attractive to students of
all colors. In particular, the study recommends the establishment of a
college of engineering at Jackson State, which will also offer doctoral
programs in business, social work, and urban and regional development.
“Jackson [State] is one of the few capital cities or metropolitan
regions of its size that fails to offer an engineering program to
citizens of the region,” the report states. “An engineering program is
critical to [the] enhancement of Jackson [State]’s ability to attract
and retain business and industry.”
