Mississippi Ordered to Set Uniform Education Rules to End Segregation

Mississippi cannot close either a mostly black university or a mostly white women’s university as it had planned to claim that it has ended its racially segregated system of higher education, a federal judge ruled Tuesday.

Instead, the state must establish one set of admissions standards for all eight of its universities, U.S. District Judge Neal Biggers said.

They now vary from school to school, with less stringent requirements at the black institutions.

Furthermore, the state must redistribute many of its higher education programs, particularly on the graduate level, and spend about $30 million to beef up the mostly black schools.

Biggers’ ruling came in a 1975 suit accusing Mississippi of maintaining separate higher education systems for blacks and whites and seeking more money and better programs for historically black universities. The U.S. Justice Department, long critical of Mississippi’s educational system, joined the case.

Biggers ruled in 1987 that the state had done enough, but the U.S. Supreme Court disagreed in 1992 and ordered Mississippi to remove all vestiges of the dual system, calling the predominantly black institutions educationally inferior and underfunded.