Word: alcorn
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...past 120 years, Alcorn State University, situated on a remote Mississippi campus, has been attended almost exclusively by blacks. It is typical of the nation's 47 historically black state-run colleges, most of them in the Deep South, which were founded as the stepchildren of a segregated public education system. The institutions were eventually touted as providing "separate but equal" training for blacks excluded from universities such as Ole Miss. What was missing, mostly, was equality: the schools were underfunded, understaffed and ignored, a condition that persists in varying degrees today...
...Alcorn State (enrollment: 3,317) is at the center of a legal struggle that could have the same significance for public higher education as the hard- fought battles over school desegregation of the 1950s. A class-action suit was filed in 1975 by a group of students, parents and taxpayers who demanded that all of Mississippi's black colleges receive more money and aid to make up for the decades of neglect. The case has finally made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, and arguments will be heard next week. It marks the first time the Justices will consider...
Contrary to the national trends, black college enrollment in Mississippi is declining. The state's three historically black state-run schools -- Alcorn State, Jackson State and Mississippi Valley State -- educate the majority of black residents who go on to college. In 1981 the three schools graduated 1,353 students, while the predominantly white universities graduated 584 blacks. By 1990 the number of degrees granted at black schools had dropped to 935, while predominantly white schools awarded only 610. Contends Alvin O. Chambliss Jr., a Mississippi legal aid lawyer who has shepherded the plaintiffs' case from its outset: "Our black colleges...
What Chambliss calls the "inherently superior resources and programs" of the formerly white schools shows up dramatically in a comparison of Alcorn State and the flagship agricultural and engineering school, Mississippi State, in Starkville, 210 miles northeast of Alcorn. Both are land-grant institutions, and both focus on agricultural and livestock research...
...similarities virtually end there. Mississippi State, with 14,700 students, offers more than 200 undergraduate and graduate degrees. Its library, with more than 1 million volumes, is the biggest in the state. Alcorn's academic offerings are limited almost exclusively to degrees in education and agriculture. The plaintiffs are demanding an end to the artificially high entrance barrier at the formerly white schools. But more important, they want Mississippi to spend enough money on Alcorn and the other black schools to upgrade their standards, and to add remedial programs to assist black students as they enroll at the predominantly white...