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By: A’naya Jones

 

For generations, education has represented more than an opportunity for Black Americans to earn a degree. It has represented freedom, mobility, and the ability to challenge systems designed to limit Black communities. During Jim Crow, Black educators and students pursued education despite a system that deliberately restricted where and how they could learn. Education became one of the tools through which Black communities challenged the boundaries placed around them. 

During the Jim Crow era, which emerged in the late 1870s and extended into the mid-1960s, Black communities faced educational inequality while developing strategies to challenge it. One example was the creation of “segregation scholarships,” publicly funded programs that allowed Black students to pursue graduate and professional degrees outside their home states rather than requiring states to integrate white universities or adequately develop graduate programs at Black colleges. According to historian Crystal R. Sanders in her book, A Forgotten Migration: Black Southerners, Segregation Scholarships, and the Debt Owed to Public HBCUs⁠, sixteen Southern states established these programs between 1921 and 1948. Although the scholarships provided some students with access to advanced degrees, they also helped states maintain segregation and, in some cases, diverted money from already underfunded public historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs).

Black communities also challenged educational inequality by creating alternative learning opportunities. During the 1964 Mississippi Summer Project, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) helped establish Freedom Schools for Black youth. The SNCC Digital Gateway’s history of the Freedom Schools⁠ explains that SNCC developed a curriculum in the spring of 1964 that included citizenship education and Black history. The lessons encouraged students to examine their experiences with racial discrimination, understand the political realities of Mississippi, and explore their ability to participate in civic life. Unlike segregation scholarship programs, which operated within a system designed to preserve racial separation, Freedom Schools gave Black students opportunities to question that system and connect education to their communities’ experiences and aspirations.

Together, these examples show that the struggle over Black education has involved more than access to classrooms or degrees. It has also involved who controls educational institutions, how those institutions are funded, whose histories are taught, and whether Black students and communities have the power to shape their own educational experiences.

That history provides a lens through which to examine educational inequality today. 

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Why It Matters Now

Although the legal system of Jim Crow has ended, educational resources remain unevenly distributed. These disparities can be seen in classroom supplies, school funding, and the resources available to students in different communities. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 94.8% of public-school teachers reported spending their own money on classroom supplies without reimbursement during the 2019–2020 school year. Among those teachers, the average amount spent was $470. 

Teachers purchasing pencils, paper, books, and other classroom materials may appear to be an individual act of generosity. However, when nearly 95% of public-school teachers report using personal funds for supplies, it raises questions about whether school budgets adequately meet classroom needs. Funding disparities extend beyond supplies. The U.S. Government Accountability Office has explained that public schools rely partly on local property taxes, which means communities with less property wealth generally have fewer resources available to support their schools. Its 2022 report on racial, ethnic, and economic divisions in K–12 education found that more than one-third of students attended schools where at least 75% of students were of a single race or ethnicity during the 2020–2021 school year. The report also explains how school district boundaries can contribute to these divisions.

These disparities matter because educational opportunity depends on more than whether a school or college exists. It also depends on whether institutions have the funding, staffing, facilities, and educational resources necessary to serve students effectively. This distinction connects the history of segregation scholarships to contemporary debates about public education: providing an individual student with a pathway to education does not necessarily ensure sustained investment in the institutions and communities that make that education possible.

How Project 2025 Affects Public Education

Project 2025 proposes a major restructuring of the federal government’s role in education, including eliminating the U.S. Department of Education and transferring certain responsibilities to other federal agencies or to states. In its Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, the education chapter proposes moving Title I, Part A—which provides additional funding to school districts serving low-income students—to the Department of Health and Human Services as a block grant, then restoring responsibility for Title I funding to states over a ten-year period. The chapter also proposes moving the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights to the Department of Justice.

These proposals raise questions about how federal education funding would be distributed, how states would assume additional responsibilities, and how civil-rights protections would be administered. Because low-income communities often have fewer local resources available to support schools, changes to federal funding and oversight could have important consequences for students who rely on those programs. The extent of those consequences would depend on how the proposals were implemented, what funding Congress authorized, and how states responded.

What This Could Mean for HBCUs

The debate also matters for HBCUs, institutions that have played a central role in expanding Black people’s access to higher education despite a long history of unequal public investment. The federal government currently administers programs intended to strengthen HBCUs, including the Title III, Part B Strengthening Historically Black Colleges and Universities Program, which provides funding for institutional facilities, financial management, academic resources, and endowments.

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Project 2025 specifically addresses HBCUs in its discussion of the Department of Education’s Office of Postsecondary Education. It proposes eliminating or transferring some of that office’s programs and recommends that institutional funding be provided through block grants narrowed to HBCUs and tribally controlled colleges. This means the proposal is not simply to eliminate all HBCU-specific funding; it would change how certain programs are organized and how funding is delivered. The potential consequences would depend on which programs were retained, how block grants were structured, and whether institutions received sufficient and reliable resources to meet their needs.

For Black students, the question is therefore not only whether HBCUs and public schools continue to exist. It is also whether they have the resources to educate students, maintain facilities, support research, and provide pathways to graduation and employment. Changes in federal education programs could affect how institutions access support, making it important to examine the details of proposed funding and administrative changes rather than assume that every institution would experience the same outcome.

The Continuing Struggle Over Black Education

The history of segregation scholarships demonstrates that access to education can exist alongside unequal investment in educational institutions. Under Jim Crow, some states provided Black students with scholarships to study elsewhere while maintaining segregation and, in some cases, drawing money from already underfunded Black colleges. The history of those programs offers a lens through which to examine contemporary debates about school funding, federal education policy, and support for HBCUs.

Project 2025’s proposals are not the same as Jim Crow-era segregation policies, and the two periods should not be treated as identical. However, both histories invite questions about who controls educational opportunities, how institutions are funded, and what happens when responsibility for providing or protecting those opportunities shifts. For today’s Black youth, the future of education will be shaped not only by access to classrooms and degrees, but also by the resources available to their schools and colleges and the protections that help ensure equal educational opportunity.

This history matters now because today’s Black youth are not simply inheriting the educational system that previous generations fought to access. They are inheriting decisions about who controls that system, how it is funded, and what protections accompany it.

Bio: A’naya C. Jones is a Wayne State University senior majoring in Criminal Justice with a minor in Journalism and serves as President of the NAACP Michigan State Conference Youth & College Division. A youth and civic engagement advocate, she is passionate about voter education, leadership development, community service, and empowering young people to use their voices and participate in their communities.

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