He highlights laws like the Morrill Act of 1862, which was supposed to provide grants of land to states to finance the establishment of colleges specializing in “agriculture and the mechanical arts.” But state lawmakers misused or did not apply it to Black colleges. The years of federal neglect led Harris to conclude that HBCUs are owed reparations from the overall bias they have suffered. That fundamental question Harris pondered for a decade became the impetus for his newly released book, “The State Must Provide: Why America’s Colleges Have Always Been Unequal-and How to Set Them Right.” A reporter for The Atlantic, Harris crafted a comprehensive work that examines the vast history of how racial discrimination against historically Black colleges and universities manifested itself in governmental underfunding and undermining that augmented many of the schools’ lifelong struggles. Why were the facilities superior at the predominately white school founded in 1950 than the historically Black university founded 75 years earlier, in 1875? Those differences sparked a question: Why?
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