Censoring books about race

Do you remember what a “segregation scholarship” is – or was?

“A Forgotten Migration: Black Southerners, Segregation Scholarships, and the Debt Owed to Public HBCUs” by Crystal R. Sanders explains.

Sanders shows that these so-called “segregation scholarships” were an important part of efforts to maintain segregation in higher education
during a time of changing rules and regulations about race.

Under the Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson” decision (1896) southern states could provide graduate opportunities for African Americans by creating separate but equal graduate programs at tax-supported Black colleges or by admitting Black students to historically white
institutions.

Instead, many Southern states adopted a program of paying the added costs to Black graduate students who enrolled in graduate programs at
out-of-state institutions.

“A Forgotten Migration” tells the story of how and why these so-called segregation scholarships were awarded by states in the U.S. South to
Black students seeking graduate education in the pre–Brown v. Board of Education (1954) era. Under the “Plessy v. Ferguson” decision, decades earlier, southern states could provide graduate opportunities for Blacks by creating separate but equal graduate programs at
tax-supported Black colleges or by admitting Black students to historically white institutions. Most did neither and instead paid to send Black students out of state for graduate education.

Sanders tells about Black graduate students who relocated to outside the South to continue their education with segregation scholarships,
revealing the many challenges they faced along the way.

Students who entered out-of-state programs endured long and tedious travel, financial hardship, racial discrimination, isolation, and  homesickness. With the Brown decision in 1954, segregation scholarships began to wane, but the integration of graduate programs at southern public universities was slow. In telling this story, Sanders demonstrates how white efforts to preserve segregation led to the underfunding of public Black colleges, furthering racial inequality in American higher education.

Could Sanders’ powerful description of the problems Black graduate students faced make it more likely the book will be censored by government agencies?

According to a May 9 Associated Press report, “The Pentagon has ordered all military leaders and commands to pull and review all of their library books that address diversity, anti-racism or gender issues by May 21, according to a memo issued to the force on Friday. It is the broadest and most detailed directive so far on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s campaign to rid the military of diversity and equity programs, policies and instructional materials. And it follows similar efforts to remove hundreds of books from the libraries at the military academies.

“Educational materials at the libraries ‘promoting divisive concepts and gender ideology are incompatible with the Department’s core mission,’ the memo states, adding that department leaders must ‘promptly identify’ books that are not compatible with that mission and sequester them by May 21.

“By then, the memo says, additional guidance will be provided on how to cull that initial list and determine what should be removed and ‘determine an appropriate ultimate disposition’ for those materials. It does not say what will happen to the books or whether they will be
stored away or destroyed.”

According to the memo, a temporary academic libraries committee set up by the department will provide information on the review and decisions about the books. That panel provided a list of search terms to use in the initial identification of the books to be pulled and reviewed.

The search terms include affirmative action, anti-racism, critical race theory, discrimination, diversity, gender dysphoria, gender identity and transition, transgender, transsexual and white privilege.

Early last month the U.S. Naval Academy, removed nearly 400 books from its library after being told by Hegseth’s office to get rid of those
that promote DEI. The Army and Air Force libraries have been told to go through their stacks to find books related to diversity, equity and
inclusion. The Naval Academy’s purge led to the removal of books on the Holocaust, histories of feminism, civil rights and racism.

Can Sanders’ important book survive such purges?