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Four years ago, a landmark Forbes investigation put a number on something Black college leaders had argued for generations: their institutions had been systematically short-changed by the states that were legally obligated to fund them. The figure — at least $12.8 billion in missed state and federal appropriations to the nation’s 18 public land-grant HBCUs between 1987 and 2020 — became a rallying cry from campus rallies in Tallahassee to congressional hearing rooms in Washington.
Today, the number is still the number. What has changed is smaller, messier, and far more uneven than the headlines once suggested.
The disparity traces to the Morrill Acts of 1862 and 1890. The first gave states federal land to build public colleges — almost exclusively for white students. The second, passed after decades of exclusion, required states with segregated systems to either integrate or establish separate land-grant institutions for Black students, with an explicit mandate: equitable distribution of state funds between the two. Most states chose separation. Few chose equity.
By comparing per-student state appropriations at Black land-grant schools against their white counterparts over three decades, Forbes found gaps ranging from tens of millions of dollars to more than $2.8 billion at North Carolina A&T, the largest shortfall of any of the 18 institutions. Florida A&M and Tennessee State were close behind, each underfunded by more than $1.9 billion.
Shirking Responsibility
The obligation isn’t ambiguous, says Dr. Kenneth Parker, a higher education consultant and former analyst at the U.S. Department of Education.
“The 1890 Act isn’t a suggestion, it’s a matching requirement,” Parker said. “When a state shortchanges its land-grant HBCU for thirty years, that’s not an oversight, it’s a policy choice, and one a governor’s letter alone can’t undo.”
In September 2023, the Biden administration escalated the pressure. Education Secretary Dr. Miguel A. Cardona and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack sent individual letters to the governors of 16 states — Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and West Virginia — using federal data to spell out exactly what each state owed its land-grant HBCU. Only Delaware and Ohio, the letters noted, had funded their institutions equitably.
The response split almost immediately along partisan and institutional lines. Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin disputed that his state had underfunded Virginia State University. West Virginia introduced legislation to close the funding gap going forward but ruled out retroactive payment. Missouri lawmakers pushed for a formal study of Lincoln University’s losses, modeled on an earlier Tennessee review. Georgia legislators threatened legal action over a roughly $600 million gap between the University of Georgia and Fort Valley State but produced no new appropriation. Most states, in short, acknowledged the letter arrived, and moved on.
Owed and Overdue
That gap between acknowledgment and action is the defining feature of the last four years, Parker said.
“What we’ve seen since 2022 is a lot of acknowledgment and very little repayment,” he said. “States are comfortable admitting the number exists, but they’re far less comfortable writing the check.”
Maryland remains the clearest example of acknowledgment translating into money. In 2021, the state settled a 15-year-old federal lawsuit brought by Morgan State, Coppin State, Bowie State and the University of Maryland Eastern Shore, agreeing to pay $577 million over a decade to remedy program duplication and underinvestment. Gov. Wes Moore’s administration has continued building on that commitment, and Maryland’s Legislative Black Caucus has pushed to keep UMES funding parity a standing budget priority rather than a one-time fix. It took a lawsuit — not a letter — to get there.
Showdown in the Volunteer State
No state’s reckoning has been messier, or more instructive, than Tennessee’s. A bipartisan legislative committee, formed after the 2020 protests over George Floyd’s murder, found the state had failed to match federal land-grant funds for Tennessee State University at all between 1957 and 2007 — a gap the committee pegged at $150 million to $544 million. In 2023, Tennessee’s legislature appropriated $250 million toward that debt, mostly for capital projects. When the Biden administration separately calculated a $2.1 billion per-student funding gap, Republican state lawmakers dismissed it as a “political number” that has gained no further traction in the legislature.
The story took another turn when Tennessee State nearly ran out of money. In late 2024, a financial crisis driven by enrollment swings, mismanagement findings, and the end of pandemic relief funds left the university needing $43 million in emergency state funding just to make payroll. New leadership has since turned a projected deficit into a $13.2 million surplus, and TSU later negotiated release of $96 million from the original $250 million settlement for operating needs rather than maintenance alone.
That fight has now become a book. Dr. Glenda Glover, TSU’s first female president, published How Dare You in June 2026, calling the university’s underfunding the greatest financial injustice in Tennessee history and detailing the state’s internal $544 million calculation, along with what she describes as sustained resistance to paying it.
“It’s never too late to do what’s right,” said Glover, who frames the fight as “the next educational civil rights battle” and notes that “the debt is still not paid.”
What Glover found, she says, was that Tennessee matched land-grant funds for the University of Tennessee at two to five times the rate it matched them for TSU. When she raised that finding, she said that state officials focused less on the money owed than on her administration’s spending, an audit dispute that in December 2025 turned up more than $1,100 billing errors cutting both ways. She has also said that a state-directed, no-bid campus beautification contract, which she says ballooned past $13 million without warning, deepened the cash-flow crunch that was later blamed on her leadership.
Glover has since founded Fair Funding, a national advocacy organization helping other HBCU presidents press their own states for repayment.
Journalist Adam Harris, author of The State Must Provide: The Definitive History of Racial Inequality in Higher Education, has long argued the moral logic behind that campaign: because states built the segregated system that produced these gaps, the obligation to close them falls on states, too. As he put it in reporting on the FAMU case, the people who ran Southern flagship universities “created, fostered, maintained, and defended an inequitable system” — one that outlasted the segregation laws that built it.
With most legislatures unmoved, courts have become the more consequential venue. Florida A&M students sued the state in 2022 over a roughly $1.9 billion gap; a federal judge dismissed the case in 2024, ruling the students hadn’t shown the disparity traced to legally mandated segregation. This June, a divided Eleventh Circuit panel revived the lawsuit, finding the lower court had weighed evidence rather than simply asking whether the claims were plausible. The case now returns to trial — and advocates in Mississippi and elsewhere are watching closely, since a plaintiff win could offer a legal template beyond voluntary state action.
“Letters from Washington got states’ attention, but courts are what’s actually moving money,” Parker said. “The FAMU ruling this summer tells every other land-grant HBCU that the legal path is still open, even after a dismissal.”
Add it up, and the ledger four years after the Forbes report looks like this: one state, Maryland, reached a binding settlement and is paying it out. One state, Tennessee, made a partial legislative payment tied to its own internal audit, while disputing a much larger federal estimate. A handful of states launched studies or floated legislation that stalled. Most of the 16 states flagged by federal officials in 2023 have taken no new funding action at all. And a shifting political climate in Washington — where the current administration has paired continued permanent HBCU funding with cuts to broader minority-serving-institution grants — has complicated rather than clarified the path forward.
The $12.8 billion figure hasn’t moved much. What has moved is where the pressure is coming from: increasingly, it’s not federal letters but courtrooms, legislative audits, and books like Glover’s — written by the people who spent years inside the fight — that are keeping the question alive.
Walter Hudson is a veteran journalist who has served as a writer and editor for numerous publications including serving as a senior editor and online editor for The EDU Ledger, and a copy editor at The New York Times, and The Philadelphia Inquirer.
