Miss. to Pay $500 Million in Bias Case

In one of the largest desegregation settlements in U.S. history, the state of Mississippi agreed Monday to spend $500 million to improve its historically black colleges and end claims of discrimination dating back a quarter of a century.

The pact--anxiously watched by other states that also maintain virtually segregated campuses--promises an end to a case that has created an ongoing racial schism in Mississippi and shone a spotlight on its history of segregation.

Blacks in Mississippi long have claimed that the state’s three mostly black colleges are neglected stepchildren in the higher education system--with faculty salaries, facilities and programs well below the standards set at the state’s five primarily white schools.

The agreement filed Monday in federal court in Mississippi seeks to correct that imbalance, and Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft said it should “increase access to quality educational opportunities” for everyone in Mississippi.

A relieved state Atty. Gen. Mike Moore said: “All we need now is the court’s approval and we’re done. This is a very big day for us.”

There are about 120 historically black colleges and universities in about two dozen states, most of them in the South, according to federal education data. Many observers believe that the Mississippi case could set a precedent for how other states deal with sensitive issues surrounding black colleges--particularly when it comes to enrollment standards.

The agreement in the class-action lawsuit provides $246 million over the next 17 years for academic programs at the state’s black universities, along with hundreds of millions more for capital improvements and educational endowments. There was no legal provision for black students to claim individual damages in the settlement, federal officials said.

The U.S. government, a plaintiff in the case, in recent years has reached several desegregation settlements in Southern states that were found to have discriminated against minorities. The Mississippi agreement is probably the largest, narrowly eclipsing a series of settlements reached in Louisiana in the early 1990s, Justice Department officials said.

But in a state where federal marshals in the 1960s had to force officials to open the doors of the best state colleges to blacks, not everyone is happy. Some plaintiffs--who originally sought $800 million--complained that it does not go far enough. And critics hint that they may try to challenge it in court.

Indeed, the woman whose late husband first sued the state in 1975 because he didn’t think his son was getting the same education as whites said in an interview that she doesn’t believe black colleges will be helped all that much by the agreement.

“The black colleges have so little and white colleges have so much,” said 72-year-old Lillie Ayers of Glen Allan, Miss. “It hasn’t changed much. We’re back where we started.”

The case has dragged through the courts for years, going all the way to the Supreme Court--which found in 1992 that Mississippi had not done nearly enough to dismantle its formerly segregated and unequal system of higher education. The litigation has provoked particularly sharp debate in Mississippi during the last few months, as the effort to hash out a settlement intensified.

One major concern among some blacks is that the lawsuit could in effect shut down some of the state’s mostly black colleges--Alcorn State, Jackson State and Mississippi Valley State universities.

While the schools are open to all races, the student populations are overwhelmingly black; at Alcorn State, for instance, the black enrollment is about 95%. But the agreement requires the colleges to reach a 10% nonblack enrollment in coming years to gain full control over the use of about $105 million in endowment money provided by the state under the settlement.

Education officials in Mississippi said the state has declared a strong commitment to maintaining its historically black colleges, and Justice Department officials say they do not believe that the 10% requirement will effectively put black colleges out of existence, as some critics suggest.

“I just don’t understand that concern,” said one Justice Department official involved in the litigation, who asked not to be identified. “This is a win-win for everyone.”

But others are taking a more cautious, if optimistic approach.

“I can’t help but welcome this,” said Lynn Huntley, executive vice president of the Southern Education Foundation in Atlanta, a charity that works to promote educational opportunities for minorities and the poor.

“This is significant given the amount of money involved, but we will have to see over time whether the system makes a good-faith attempt to implement the terms of the agreement. That’s why consent decrees are subject to court monitoring,” she said in an interview.

In a case that has dragged on for more than 25 years, Huntley said some people are skeptical about whether the agreement will ever mean an equal opportunity for all state residents.

“This has taken so long because there is a history of resistance to change,” she said.

“This will certainly form a point of departure for the other states [that have historically black colleges] to compare their experiences and results. But all of these state systems have miles to go before they will achieve a situation of fairness in dismantling the vestiges of discrimination.”