A Comparative Financial Analysis of Louisiana's Land-Grant Universities: The Morrill Acts and <em>Brown</em> Revisited

Despite a federal legislative mandate on states to support land-grant HBCUs in a fair and equitable fashion, the funding disparities [between land-grant Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and non-HBCU land-grant universities] accrued for decades and ostensibly for more than a century. Our purpose in this review is to explain the history, nature, and scope of this funding disparity. We are particularly interested in how Brown v. Board of Education (Brown I and Brown II) and related litigation and desegregation policy shaped this history. To narrow the scope of the review, we localize the problem to Louisiana. A state perspective is important as higher education desegregation plans and political decisions related to university funding appropriations are state specific. This abstract has been taken from the authors' introduction.