SARAH MCCAMMON, HOST:
State governments across the South have underfunded their historically Black public colleges and universities, or HBCUs. So how should these debts be repaid? States have wrestled with this question for decades, and it's led to lawsuits, university mergers and, in one case, a student-led hunger strike. Reporters Emily Siner and Camellia Burris tell the story of one of these public HBCUs, Tennessee State University in Nashville, in their podcast "The Debt." Emily and Camellia, welcome to the program.
EMILY SINER: Thanks for having us.
CAMELLIA BURRIS, BYLINE: Thank you.
MCCAMMON: I want to start with something that got national attention a few years ago. The state of Tennessee came out with a report saying that it had underfunded its public HBCU by up to half a billion - with a B - dollars. How did that happen?
BURRIS: Well, TSU is a land-grant university, and these schools were created when the federal government gave states money or land to start colleges. But in the South, states ended up opening Black colleges to keep getting those federal funds but maintain segregation. And the state is required to match some of those federal funds. But for the Black schools, they usually did not.
Fast forward to 2012 or so. There was a new lawmaker in Tennessee named Harold Love. Someone told him that TSU still wasn't getting its matching funds. Love did some research and found that it's true. TSU was not getting matching funds for many years. But the University of Tennessee, the state's other land-grant university, always got their matching funds. It wasn't until the summer of 2020, though, and the George Floyd protests when the state legislature agreed to really do some research into the back pay. And they found out that since the 1950s, the state owed up to $544 million, not including inflation.
MCCAMMON: Wow. I mean, that is a lot of money. Did lawmakers know this was happening since the 1950s?
SINER: Yes, they did. In fact, Harold Love's own father, who was also a state lawmaker, tried to raise the alarm about this in the early 1970s. And there were these big fights in court over funding for TSU more broadly. In 1968, a woman named Rita Geier sued the state of Tennessee over its unfair treatment and funding of TSU, and this case lasted for 38 years. So it was talked about for almost four decades.
In the early years of the case, they argued that the state should shut down the University of Tennessee's offshoot campus in Nashville because it was a predominantly white school in direct competition for funding with TSU. This was something that TSU really wanted, but the white leadership of the state did not like this idea of a merger. We spoke to one TSU administrator from the mid-1970s named George Pruitt, who talked about just how stressful this period of time was.
(SOUNDBITE OF PODCAST, "THE DEBT")
GEORGE PRUITT: We knew we were at war. We knew that our jobs were at stake. We knew that if we lost, we were all going to get fired. But you'll have to remember, this was in the middle '70s. You know, Martin Luther King had been killed in '68. So we knew what we were up against, but we didn't care.
MCCAMMON: Wow. So what was the result of that case?
SINER: Well, the judge ended up approving the merger of TSU and UT Nashville. He agreed that, yeah, it's not going to work to have two universities with these kinds of demographics in the same city, and so keep the preexisting university, TSU, and fold this new university, UT Nashville, into it. It was a huge deal for TSU because the idea was that the University of Tennessee, which was almost all white, was always given plenty of resources. It had plenty of respect from state lawmakers, and now that was all going to be transferred to TSU.
But it didn't work out that way because the merger still never really addressed the underlying issue of funding and what the state owed. The buildings were still falling apart. The teachers were still poorly paid. Many white students ended up leaving. There was an attempt in the late '80s to give TSU $22 million to fix asbestos in their buildings, and even that got pushback from some people in the state who complained that TSU was getting special treatment.
BURRIS: Yeah, and we saw this come to a boiling point in 1990. TSU students were fed up with the conditions on campus, so they staged a sit-in at a building on TSU's campus for two weeks. Some even went on a hunger strike. Antonio Terry was one of those students who occupied the building.
(SOUNDBITE OF PODCAST, "THE DEBT")
ANTONIO TERRY: The news people came in, and they went into the rooms and they saw the asbestos. They filmed it and showed it. The public is looking at it on the news. Like, these students are not lying. Look at this. How can they live in this kind of condition? And that's what won the public over.
BURRIS: And this actually worked. Finally, the governor of Tennessee at the time made a push for giving TSU more funding to improve its buildings. But the buildings were just one piece of the puzzle. As we saw with representative Harold Love, there were still other debts that did not come up even in this 38-year case.
MCCAMMON: Yeah, and it sounds like it had to get really bad before anything at all was done when it came to the asbestos issue. Just going back to Harold Love, what happened with his efforts to recover that state land-grant funding for TSU?
SINER: So, he did get a major victory. In 2022, the state legislature approved $250 million for TSU. But then a report came out from the Biden administration, which was looking at underfunding of public HBCUs across the South, and it said Tennessee owed TSU more than $2 billion, so way more. And that led to a whole new conversation around, like, how do you even calculate the debt? How do you know when you've broken even? And maybe, more importantly, how do you actually get people in power to feel a sense of responsibility around it?
MCCAMMON: We've been talking with Camellia Burris and Emily Siner of "The Debt" podcast from Nashville Public Radio, which you can listen to anywhere you get your podcasts. Thank you both so much.
SINER: Thank you.
BURRIS: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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