Word: alcorn
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...Generally, Cambridge is a very popular place to be," said Sally R. Alcorn, executive director of the Harvard Square Business Association...
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...
...situation at Alcorn State illustrates, it is impossible to have it both ways: seeking a color-blind and integrated system of state-funded education, while at the same time preserving a system of black colleges that both the President and the plaintiffs believe can play a useful role. If the Supreme Court rules that the states do not need to provide a remedy, these institutions will wither away. "A defeat will spell, legally, the beginning of the end for black colleges," says Chambliss. "They're hanging by fingernails...