A long-running fight over how to calculate and repay state funding debts to public HBCUs is flaring across the South, and Emily Siner and Camellia Burris tell the story in their podcast ‘The Debt’ from Nashville Public Radio and The Tennessee Lookout.
SARAH MCCAMMON, HOST:
State governments across the South have underfunded their historically Black public colleges and universities, or HBCUs.So how should these debts be repaid? States have wrestled with this question for decades, and it’s led to lawsuits, university mergers and, in one case, a student-led hunger strike. Reporters Emily Siner and Camellia Burris tell the story of one of these public HBCUs, Tennessee State University in Nashville, in their podcast “the Debt.” Emily and Camellia, welcome to the program.
EMILY SINER: Thanks for having us.
CAMELLIA BURRIS, BYLINE: Thank you.
MCCAMMON: I want to start with something that got national attention a few years ago.The state of Tennessee came out with a report saying that it had underfunded its public HBCU by up to half a billion – with a B – dollars. How did that happen?
BURRIS: Well, TSU is a land-grant university, and these schools were created when the federal government gave states money or land to start colleges.But in the South, states ended up opening Black colleges to keep getting those federal funds but maintain segregation. And the state is required to match some of those federal funds. But for the Black schools,they usually did not.
Fast forward to 2012 or so. There was a new lawmaker in Tennessee named Harold Love.Someone told him that TSU still wasn’t getting its matching funds. love did some research and found that it’s true. TSU was not getting matching funds for many years. But the University of tennessee, the state’s other land-grant university, always got their matching funds. It wasn’t until the summer of 2020, though, and the George Floyd protests when the state legislature agreed to really do some research into the back pay.And they found out that as the 1950s, the state owed up to $544 million, not including inflation.
MCCAMMON: Wow. I mean, that is a lot of money. Did lawmakers know this was happening since the 1950s?
SINER: Yes, they did. In fact, Harold Love’s own father, who was also a state lawmaker, tried to raise the alarm about this in the early 1970s. And there were these big fights in court over funding for TSU more broadly. In 1968, a woman named Rita Geier sued the state of tennessee over its unfair treatment and funding of TSU, and this case lasted for 38 years. So it was talked about for almost four decades.
In the early years of the case, they argued that the state should shut down the University of Tennessee’s offshoot campus in Nashville because it was a predominantly white school in direct competition for funding with TSU.This was something that TSU really wanted, but the white leadership of the state did not like this idea of a merger. We spoke to one TSU administrator from the mid-1970s named George Pruitt, who talked about just how stressful this period of time was.
(SOUNDBITE OF PODCAST, “THE DEBT”)
GEORGE PRUITT: We knew we were at war. We knew that our jobs were at stake. We knew that if we lost, we were all going to get