Why this matters

Historically Black colleges and universities have trained generations of Black teachers, doctors and organizers for more than 150 years. They did it while states gave them less money than the public schools they built for white students. That gap is still with us. Many of these campuses also sit in neighborhoods where rising rents and new development are pushing out the Black families who have lived around them for generations.

On Oct. 7, 2026, students and alumni of Lincoln University sued the state of Missouri in federal court, asking for a $549 million fund to make up for decades of state money the school never received (St. Louis Public Radio). This is part of a long pattern. In 2021, Maryland agreed to pay $577 million over ten years to settle a 15-year lawsuit over underfunding at its four HBCUs (CBS Baltimore). Those dollars came only after students and alumni spent years in court.

In 2023, the U.S. Departments of Education and Agriculture sent letters to the governors of 16 states. The letters showed that those states had underfunded their land-grant HBCUs by more than $12 billion between 1987 and 2020, compared with the land-grant universities they funded for white students (Tennessee Lookout). Tennessee State University alone was shorted about $2.1 billion over that time (WPLN). So the gap is measured in billions of dollars, and most of it has never been paid back.

But state budgets respond to pressure from the people who live in that state. You can give to the HBCU near you, show up for its students and vote in the state races that decide its funding. We built this site to make each of those steps a little easier to take.