Word: chambliss
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...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 are dying on the vine, and it's criminal...
Mississippi publicly ended college segregation in 1962. But Chambliss argues that only continued discrimination can explain why all of the state's formerly whites-only universities remain more than 80% white, even though about half of Mississippi's public high school graduates are black. He contends that the discrimination is bolstered by policies like Mississippi's reliance on the ACT assessment test as the primary criteria for admission to colleges. The score requirement set for admission to Mississippi's onetime white colleges is higher than at the historically black schools...
...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...
...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...