A Rare Power: How Mississippi’s Higher Education Governing Board Stymied a Remedy for Segregation
Brief

Natalya Brill/New America
Oct. 21, 2025
Introduction
In the summer of 2001, faculty leaders at Mississippi’s historically Black colleges wanted a meeting with the state’s governor, Ronnie Musgrove.[1] On the table was a proposed $503 million deal to address Mississippi’s legacy of discrimination in higher education that fell far short of the goal. The presidents of the faculty senates at Jackson State, Alcorn State, and Mississippi Valley State Universities had joined alumni and community members in the Mississippi Coalition on Black Higher Education to fight it. “[It] does not compensate for the past treatment of African Americans,” they wrote in a letter to the governor, “and the institutions which they were expected and required to attend.”
The leaders outlined an alternative vision: Alcorn, Mississippi’s second-oldest public university, should be a full-fledged land-grant on par with Mississippi State; Jackson State, a comprehensive urban university with law, communications, and urban planning programs; and Valley, a technical hub modeled after Georgia Tech.
To that point in time, Mississippi’s Black colleges had been underfunded for nearly 130 years, ever since Alcorn State had its annual appropriation slashed by the state’s “redemption” government at the end of the state’s Reconstruction era, and no single settlement could undo that history overnight. It could begin the process, though. Transformation is never impossible, but there is always a question of whether or not it will be the right transformation. The coalition had concrete objections that highlighted that tension. They flagged admissions rules that shut out half of Black applicants, faculty pay at historically Black colleges and universities, or HBCUs, that lagged behind professors at predominantly white-campuses, and they criticized how the endowment dollars would be locked away until HBCUs could recruit more white students. They expected better.
By the early 2000s, it was easy to forget that this negotiation was never a given. In 1975, Black Mississippians, led by Jake Ayers, Sr., a civil rights veteran and the father of a student at Jackson State University, filed a lawsuit against the state, charging that its three public historically Black colleges had been systematically underfunded. Their claims gained federal force in 1992, when the Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Fordice—also known as Ayers—that policies that were race-neutral on their face could preserve a segregated order. “That college attendance is by choice and not by assignment does not mean that a race-neutral admissions policy cures the constitutional violation of a dual system,” Justice Byron White wrote in the majority opinion. “In a system based on choice, student attendance is determined not simply by admissions policies, but also by many other factors.” Admissions cutoffs, program duplication rules, and funding formulas did not mention race explicitly, but in practice they maintained the same barriers and disparities that had marked the segregated era.
The decision set a new standard: States had to act to dismantle the vestiges of legal segregation in higher education, particularly around HBCUs. Things from history did not stay in the past. But in the same way students and families had to desegregate America after the Brown decisions, change after the 1992 Ayers decision wasn’t immediate.
A decade later, on the verge of a settlement, the tensions that animated the original lawsuit lingered. Peyton Prospere, the governor’s chief legal counsel, worried that some of the Black politicians, who had been criticized for supporting an incomplete settlement, were getting cold feet. “Reuben [Anderson] had a heated discussion with Isaac yesterday,” Prospere wrote to the governor in the eleventh hour. Anderson, the first Black justice on Mississippi’s Supreme Court, was trying to convince Isaac Byrd, Jr., the new lawyer for the plaintiffs, to sign the deal. “Isaac is under pressure; they are saying he is selling out. Reuben believes that Isaac is having trouble pulling the trigger.” The judge was expecting a signed agreement, he confided, but “told Reuben that if Isaac can’t step up we need to get the Congressman to do so.” Congressman Bennie Thompson, one of the original plaintiffs who had recently been elected to the U.S. Congress, had been getting those same calls.
On February 15, 2002, the state committed to spend $503 million over 17 years—$246 million for new academic programs, $75 million for capital improvements, $70 million for a public endowment, $35 million in private fundraising, and additional appropriations for summer developmental education—to improve its HBCUs. “The Settlement Agreement accomplishes a full, complete, and final resolution of this controversy,” Neal B. Biggers, Jr., the federal judge who oversaw the case, wrote in his final judgment. On paper, it was the largest higher-education desegregation remedy in U.S. history.
But the settlement terms raised thorny questions about governance, sustainability, and whose priorities would shape spending the years that followed. Administrative and faculty leaders had no seat at the table. As one former college president explained to me, the settlement was worked out between politicians—Democrat and Republican—and the Board of Trustees of Mississippi’s Institutions for Higher Learning, or IHL, the state’s higher education governing association. “I also recall that the settlement was basically what IHL had on the table from the beginning,” the president said. The institutions at the heart of the case, he argued, did not have real input.
Faculty efforts to influence the board were largely for naught as well. “The board members will not move another inch,” Prospere had warned in a letter to the governor on February 16, 2001, several months before the coalition met with him. He dashed it off first thing in the morning. And the board’s version of the settlement—a board long dominated by alumni of the state’s historically white universities—empowered it to approve programs, sign off on endowment uses, and oversee construction. The argument for such power, which was protection of taxpayer resources, was fair enough. But the original reason for the lawsuit was that those same taxpayer resources had never been fairly distributed. Now, the same board that oversaw those resources in the past would be doing so again, making the paradox plain: Black colleges had secured recognition but not representation.
This brief explores what happened next. For 17 years, IHL directed the largest investment ever made in Mississippi’s Black colleges. Some initiatives transformed campuses and expanded opportunity. Others faltered under prescriptive oversight or structural limits that the settlement never addressed. Ayers offers more than a history of one state’s struggle with segregation. It is a natural experiment in governance, a test of what happens when equity remedies are delivered without structural reform.
The Board’s Power: A Lesson in Gatekeeping
Once the vehicle for change, or money, was promised, the question of how it would be steered and who would hold the wheel grew in importance. Even before the settlement money began to flow, IHL acted as gatekeeper. Every new program, every construction project, every dollar from the endowment passed through its approval.
To justify this control, the board leaned on a familiar set of rules, eliminating “unnecessary duplication,” tying endowment income to diversity thresholds, and enforcing ACT admissions cutoffs that disproportionately excluded Black students. On paper, these were neutral guardrails. In practice, they turned into hurdles that weighed on the very campuses the case was supposed to strengthen.
The engineering fight at Jackson State made the point plain. IHL commissioned a study by consultants who had urged the creation of a stand-alone engineering school tailored to the Jackson metro area, designed for commuter and working students and anchored by civil, computer, and telecommunications programs. Accreditation, they stressed, required independence from the existing School of Science and Technology, calling such autonomy essential for success.
But the commission's study, which was submitted to the court in 1998, was conservative and reduced the question of viability to one of duplication, insisting the school could only move forward if it eliminated or transferred programs already at Ole Miss or Mississippi State. In effect, HBCU growth was conditioned on contraction elsewhere—something rarely, if ever, applied in reverse when white campuses duplicated Black programs. The court approved the plan in 1999, and the university began preparations.
By 2002, when the full settlement was agreed, the board defied the recommendation for independence that the consultants had suggested. The fledgling engineering school was merged into the College of Science, Engineering, and Technology. The new dean had no engineering background, a choice that baffled faculty. Classrooms were outfitted with thin resources, laboratories lacked basic equipment, and faculty workloads ballooned. Undergraduates were required to take on course hours that exceeded those of many joint bachelor’s/master’s programs. Faculty later said the outcome mirrored exactly what the outside consultants had warned. Without independence, they said, the program could not meet accreditation standards or build a competitive pipeline. When the founding dean, John Kelly, resigned in protest, his departure underscored the deeper reality: Settlement money might flow, but authority never truly reached the campuses.
Across the Black colleges, proposals were filtered through the same set of rules—duplication reviews, diversity thresholds, centralized sign offs. What looked like neutral oversight on the board’s agenda often translated into reshaped or diluted initiatives on campus. The result was a persistent mismatch between what institutions asked for and what they received; between the transformative potential of the settlement and the narrow form it took under centralized control.
Were the Right Calls Made?
The settlement promised to reshape Mississippi’s three Black colleges, but in practice its impact was uneven. The choices made by the board revealed both the potential and the pitfalls of $500 million spent without governance reform.
At Alcorn, the early years of settlement funding produced visible gains. A new business building rose on the Lorman campus, alongside investments in biotechnology and environmental sciences. In Natchez, a gleaming new facility housed the MBA program, touted as a regional economic engine. These projects gave the campus a physical presence it had long lacked, a signal that Alcorn was more than an afterthought in Mississippi’s higher education system. Alumni pointed with pride to the new buildings, and the institution’s vice president for advancement, Marcus Ward, would later describe the settlement’s effect as “phenomenal,” helping to “change the face of Alcorn.”
But facelifts don’t change what’s inside. The Natchez MBA program opened with a new facility and fresh promise, but much of the support was front-loaded in construction dollars, not recurring resources. Like the engineering school at Jackson State, it showed how Ayers projects could raise buildings without guaranteeing the long-term faculty and funding to sustain them. By the late 2000s, the program’s future was uncertain. The final expansion phase of the Natchez facility was never realized as originally envisioned, and questions lingered about whether enrollment and resources would match the court’s early vision.
Mississippi Valley’s story was even more complicated. The campus in Itta Bena had long been starved of resources, and the settlement allowed long-overdue repairs: a renovated library, a refurbished football stadium, drainage improvements meant to keep the campus from turning into a swamp after every rain. Valley looked transformed. A tree-lined entrance led to a campus that presented itself with the dignity that university implies. But the improvements masked lingering fragility. Green spaces still flooded. Inside classrooms, students often encountered outdated equipment and bare-bones offerings.
The most consequential spending decisions at Valley and elsewhere involved programs. Consultants recommended Valley build distinctive offerings—technical and applied programs that could attract students who might otherwise attend Delta State. Instead, duplication rules hemmed it in. Proposals for expanded computer science and teacher education were either delayed or watered down. Meanwhile, the endowment funds that were supposed to stabilize Valley came with strings: Income could only be tapped once the university achieved 10 percent white enrollment for several years. That goal was nearly impossible when Delta State sat just an hour away, offering similar programs with better facilities.
The logic was integration. In practice, it left Valley fighting with one hand tied. By 2018, its enrollment remained overwhelmingly Black, and its resources—though improved—were not enough to close the gap with its white peers down the road. The very remedy meant to desegregate the system left Valley boxed in.
Were the settlement funds well spent? Capital improvements were the clearest success. New facilities at Alcorn, Valley, and Jackson gave the campuses modern spaces that they had not been afforded before. Visitors could see a tangible difference in the fine arts centers, business schools, athletic facilities, and dorm renovations. Yet these investments did not come with the operating budgets to sustain them. Without recurring state appropriations, the risk of hollow monuments was real, buildings as symbols of progress with too little inside.
Academic programs brought mixed results. Alcorn’s expansion into biotechnology and environmental sciences, for example, gave students new opportunities tied to land-grant research. Valley introduced degrees in bioinformatics and education, programs that could have been distinct draws. But IHL’s rigid focus on duplication ensured that many proposals were narrowed or redirected. Programs that might have become signature features instead looked like scaled-down copies of what was already on offer at white institutions.
Summer bridge and developmental programs were a rare area of success. Across the three HBCUs, thousands of students entered through the summer developmental pipeline, which gave those with ACT scores below automatic admission thresholds a chance to prove themselves. Monitors found the model worked: Retention and progression rates were strong, and for many, it was the only pathway into higher education. Still, the funding, annual legislative appropriations at IHL’s request, was modest—$300,000 annually statewide—and dependent on yearly appropriations.
Endowments were perhaps the most frustrating element. The public endowment of $70 million was designed to give HBCUs a permanent funding resource. Yet the condition that institutions meet racial diversity benchmarks before accessing funds turned an equity tool into a compliance mechanism. At Valley, where fewer than 2 percent of students were white, the threshold was unreachable. At Alcorn, leaders scrambled to recruit white students into agriculture and business programs, not because those students filled a mission need, but because their funding depended on it. What might have been a stabilizing resource became a political lever, more reflective of the state’s unease with Black institutions than of their capacity to grow.
The net result of the settlement was uneven. Alcorn’s profile rose; its campus became more visible and its programs more competitive. Valley gained buildings and new degrees but struggled to translate them into broader enrollment or financial strength. And across all three campuses, the structural bind remained: Money flowed, but priorities were set elsewhere. Tethering settlement resources to rules set by outsiders left the historical mission of the institutions—educating Black students from some of the poorest regions of the country—underfunded and undercut.
Was the Settlement Enough?
By any measure, the settlement delivered material victories that generations of students and faculty had demanded. After decades of fighting to prove that Mississippi’s Black colleges had been starved of resources, $503 million stood as a symbolic and material victory rolled into one.
But even as the settlement reshaped campuses, it became clear that its size alone could not undo history. Structure mattered more than scale; decision-making power remained fixed in the same hands. Boards dominated by alumni of predominantly white universities dictated which programs would stand, which would be merged, and which dollars would remain out of reach until impossible benchmarks were met. At Valley, the requirement that white enrollment rise before the endowment could be tapped turned a financial promise into a perpetual deferral. At Alcorn, duplication rules clipped the wings of proposals that might have set the college apart, leaving its programs to grow only in directions the board permitted.
This wasn’t a new tension. Mississippi had spent a century layering symbolic concessions on top of structural exclusions. The pattern repeated across generations: a burst of recognition, followed by retrenchment. The Ayers settlement fit squarely in that tradition. Even as the court declared the controversy resolved, Black colleges were quickly faced with the reality that the coalition of faculty leaders’ concerns were not misplaced.
The record shows that more one-time money, poured into the same channels, would not have solved the problem on its own. New facilities required recurring state appropriations to staff and maintain them; those appropriations declined during the very years the settlement was being disbursed. So while it seemed that they were making the pie bigger, they were really just slicing it differently. New programs were launched, but without autonomy they faltered. Even the most successful initiatives—like the summer developmental programs—operated on precarious funding, dependent on annual allocations rather than long-term commitments.
People seeking future remedies should heed the story of Ayers. Dollars alone cannot undo structural exclusion. Resources must be paired with authority, and investments must be coupled with reforms that give institutions the power to chart their own futures. Without that, remedies risk becoming what Alvin Chambliss, the original lawyer for the Black Mississippians in 1975, called them, “blood money,”—money paid to settle the case but not to change the system.
Did IHL Understand HBCU Priorities?
The structure of the settlement left IHL in the position of arbiter. On paper, the board’s charge was neutral: oversee implementation, guard against unnecessary duplication, and ensure compliance with the decree. In practice, its composition shaped its outlook. For most of the settlement years, the 12-member board was overwhelmingly drawn from the state’s historically white universities. Ole Miss, Mississippi State, and Southern Miss alumni filled the seats. At times, there was only one member who had graduated from a historically Black college. For some stretches, there were none.
This imbalance mattered. When faculty leaders at Alcorn, Valley, and Jackson raised concerns, their priorities were filtered through frameworks that bore little resemblance to their institutions’ missions. It didn’t make up for the legacy of discrimination. Alcorn’s senate president pressed for the university to be recognized as a full land-grant school, arguing that parity with Mississippi State would fulfill both historic and contemporary obligations. Valley’s leaders stressed the need for technical programs that would serve their Delta communities.
The responses, when they came, were often couched in the language of systemwide efficiency. A memo catalogued Alcorn’s “strengths” and “weaknesses”—its location and land-grant status on the one hand, its rural isolation and “disproportionate presence of marginal students” on the other. The assessment read like a justification for limits rather than a plan for empowerment.
Faculty interviews echoed this sense of being managed rather than heard. One dean at Jackson State recalled how the consultants’ advice for engineering independence was clear, yet the board merged the program anyway. At Valley, program proposals were redirected to fit within Delta State’s shadow. At Alcorn, the long fight to expand agricultural research into the Small Farm Development Center was met with capped $4 million federal matching grants rather than the transformative support envisioned in the decree.
The pattern was consistent: Where HBCU leaders articulated priorities rooted in their missions—serving commuter students, uplifting rural Black farmers, building pipelines for first-generation college-goers—IHL translated those priorities into frameworks of duplication, diversity thresholds, and resource management. The result was not always hostile, but it was rarely aligned.
The deeper problem was one of representation. A board whose members did not share the experience of those at HBCUs was charged with interpreting their needs. Even well-intentioned decisions came through a filter of assumptions. And when priorities conflicted, the board’s instinct was to preserve the status quo of the system rather than take the risks needed to strengthen historically Black institutions in the name of protecting taxpayer resources. The question of whether IHL understood HBCU priorities is therefore less a matter of intent than of design. The structure made misunderstanding inevitable.
Could the Plan Have Been Structured Differently?
From the outset, Black faculty and community leaders argued that the settlement could only succeed if it paired dollars with structural change. Their vision was to use the moment to reshape governance and align accountability with the missions of Mississippi’s Black colleges.
In August 2001, the Mississippi Coalition on Black Higher Education reiterated its position in a letter to Governor Musgrove. It outlined a deal rooted in reclassification and challenged the admissions standards that had long hemmed in its institutions. Rather than tying enrollment to rigid ACT thresholds, the coalition proposed automatic admission for students who met one of three criteria: a minimum ACT score of 13, a GPA of 2.5, or ranking in the top half of their high school class. This, the coalition argued, would expand opportunity while reflecting their institutional missions.
Equally important was governance. “Each university should have a representative on the College Board,” the coalition wrote, stressing that these members should be selected by the institutions themselves and not drawn from administrators. Without direct representation, it feared, the very board that had historically marginalized Black colleges would be entrusted to decide their futures once again. To ensure ongoing accountability, the group called for an independent monitoring body “that would include, but not be limited to, the faculty, students, staff, and citizens of the plaintiff class.”
These proposals formed an alternative remedy, one that combined financial redress with reclassification, broadened access, and a governance model that gave HBCU stakeholders a permanent seat at the table. But each of these demands was rejected. The board resisted reclassification on the grounds of cost and duplication. Admissions rules remained tethered to ACT scores, even as research showed their unfair impact on Black applicants. And the idea of board representation never gained traction; appointments continued to go overwhelmingly to alumni of the state’s historically white universities.
The accountability system that prevailed instead tied millions of dollars to assimilationist benchmarks—most notoriously, the requirement that HBCUs enroll at least 10 percent white students for three consecutive years before they could draw income from the endowment. In practice, this meant that Alcorn, Valley, and Jackson State were judged not by how well they served their constituencies, but by their ability to entice white students into environments where they had never been the majority.
The contrast with Maryland is instructive. When its own HBCU desegregation case reached settlement in 2021, the state committed $577 million to build distinctive programs at Morgan State University, Bowie State, Coppin State, and the University of Maryland-Eastern Shore. Leaders of those institutions were directly involved in determining how funds would be used. The focus was not on mimicking predominantly white peers, but on enhancing mission-specific strengths that would sustain HBCUs into the future.
By rejecting reclassification, refusing governance reform, and binding accountability to white enrollment in Mississippi, IHL ensured that its new settlement carried the same old flaw: money without power. “Those of us who disagree with the currently proposed settlement have not been allowed to express our concerns in a formal manner,” the faculty wrote in 2001. Without representation and mission-driven benchmarks, the remedies risk becoming hollow. True accountability, they argued, meant more than balance sheets. It meant trust, shared governance, and investments aligned with the communities the colleges were created to serve.
The Price Tag Debate
From the beginning, the Ayers settlement was defined as much by its headline figure as by its fine print. State officials and IHL leaders consistently touted its size. By the time interest was added, they could even say Mississippi had exceeded its obligation, disbursing more than $530 million across 17 years. When it was signed, Musgrove called it “a momentous day for the great state of Mississippi.” IHL spokespeople echoed that line for two decades, assuring skeptics that this was not a reallocation from other campuses but a new investment—“extra money” that would finally allow Black colleges to build facilities and programs on par with their peers.
Faculty and HBCU advocates told a different story. Ivory Phillips, longtime Jackson State dean and faculty leader, called the $503 million number a “big lie.” In his accounting, once you stripped away attorney fees, the never-raised $35 million private endowment, and the restrictive terms on the public endowment (tied to enrollment quotas for white students), the schools’ thin private fundraising never materialized, leaving the “private endowment” little more than an empty ledger line.
The effect was a split reality. Mississippi leaders could claim a half-billion-dollar remedy. Faculty and alumni experienced something closer to a partial concession. The truth, Phillips argued, was that the institution had received closer to $320 million in direct, discretionary support. The rest was smoke—dollars promised but never realized, or resources locked behind barriers HBCUs were unlikely to clear. “Figures don’t lie,” Phillips said in 2021, “liars lie.”
Both accounts are technically true. The legislature did appropriate the amounts the settlement required, and in some cases exceeded them. But the design of the settlement meant that much of the celebrated sum was conditional, contingent, or cosmetic.
Conclusion: A Rare Power
When the settlement wound down in 2022, the gap between Mississippi’s rhetoric and HBCU campus reality had only widened. At the outset, Governor Musgrove said the day the settlement was signed was momentous. The issue was “settled once and for all,” Commissioner David Potter said in 2004, even as Congressman Bennie Thompson, who had taken over as the lead plaintiff in the agreement, called it a “floor, not a ceiling.” By the end, IHL leaders insisted the state had spent more than $530 million, but the plaintiffs’ caveats reverberated loudly through the mire. Lillie Ayers, who took a more prominent role in the case upon her husband’s death, called the settlement “beneficial” but “not 100 percent of what we asked for.” And Alvin Chambliss, who never accepted the compromise, delivered perhaps the sharpest epitaph. He tried over and over to get the court to reopen the case, but its refusal to do so marked the death of Brown’s promise, in his opinion. The settlement was “blood money.”
In 2017, Alfred Rankins, Jr., the former president of Alcorn State University who would eventually serve on the board of IHL, succinctly bridged the settlement’s first-day optimism and its last-day accounting. “The Ayers funds have been very helpful to Alcorn,” Rankins said. “But historically the intent of the settlement was to enhance HBCUs with additional dollars to help them ‘catch-up,’ to account for decades of under-funding. When you get those funds but at the same time your base funds are not being enhanced, Ayers now is being used to supplant what’s not given by the state.”
Ayers money helped, but without a healthy base—and without authority at the schools where the money landed—it was a substitute for justice rather than justice itself. The numbers that closed the books bore Rankins’s criticism out. In 2022, as IHL authorized final distributions and “perpetual” endowment earnings, reporters noted what had not changed: Valley’s endowment income remained under committee control; the private endowment sat at roughly $1 million against a $35 million goal; and the new money the schools received from the state rested on one-time federal aid.
Ayers’ true legacy lies in what it reveals about power. From the beginning, plaintiffs insisted that equity required more than dollars, that without a voice in governance and autonomy over programs, any remedy would fall short. They were right. The money came, but the power stayed where it had always been. That tension—the gap between symbolic recognition and structural exclusion—has marked Black higher education since Reconstruction. The 1870s saw Black legislators fund Alcorn, only for those gains to be clawed back. The twentieth century brought token increases paired with restrictions. And in the twenty-first, Ayers offered the largest settlement ever, tethered to conditions that made transformation elusive.
To call the settlement a failure would be too simple. Campuses were improved, opportunities expanded, and the state did more than it had ever done before. But to call it a triumph would miss the point. The deeper inequities of governance and trust remained untouched. That is why the story of Ayers matters now. It shows that litigation and settlement can compel a check to be written, but they cannot by themselves reorder who holds authority or how priorities are set. Those changes demand politics, organizing, and the imagination to build governance beyond the frameworks that created the problem.
The settlement years are over. But the struggle they represented—over who defines higher education’s mission, whose priorities count, and how equity is measured—continues. Dollars are necessary, but they have to be coupled with the ability to decide how they’re used.
Policy Takeaways
- Money without power falls short. Resources filtered through duplication rules and diversity triggers detracts from mission; authority over program design and endowment must reside with the institutions.
- Symbolic upgrades are not structural change. Titles and ribbon-cuttings must be coupled to recurring appropriations, mission reclassification, and autonomy.
- Accountability should be realistic. Endowment triggers tied to white enrollment set HBCUs up to fail, since resources aimed at making these schools look like white institutions does not fulfill their mission.
- Base funding protections matter. Without maintenance-of-effort requirements, “extra” funds risk displacing ordinary support, and do not substitute for a healthy base budget.
- Governance reform is essential. Representation for HBCUs on statewide boards and in independent monitoring that includes faculty, students, and alumni ensures that equity dollars come with an equity voice.
Notes
[1] Firsthand documents that the author uploaded all come courtesy of the Mississippi Department of History and Archives records. The only exception to this is the Ayers Compliance reports, which were produced every year and the author made physical copies.
Acknowledgments
This brief is based on research funded in part by the Gates Foundation and Strada Education Foundation. The findings and conclusions contained within are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect positions or policies of the Gates Foundation or Strada Education Foundation. I would also like to thank the staff of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History.