The years that saw the founding of Cornell and Stanford Universities were also the years when many small private colleges...

The years that saw the founding of Cornell and Stanford Universities were also the years when many small private colleges were established in the Southern U.S. to serve the educational needs of the newly freed slaves. While great 19th century industrial entrepreneurs like Ezra Cornell and Leland Stanford gave amounts ranging from half a million to tens of millions of dollars to found great private teaching and research universities where none had previously existed, and while many others, less famous, gave impressive sums to expand and refurbish modest college establishments that had already taken root, there were not comparable benefactions for private Black higher educational institutions. Only in the 20th century, and then mostly through the donations of a handful of individuals and bodies like the General Education Board of the Rockefeller Foundation and the Julius Rosenwald Fund, did the struggling private Black institutions begin to receive support in single-gift amounts larger than a few thousand dollars.

A similar disparity existed between Black and White state-supported institutions. The Morrill Act of 1862 is considered by some to be the most important piece of federal legislation affecting state-supported higher education in the 19th century. It created the basis on which states established land-grant institutions throughout the country, most successfully perhaps in the midwestern States. Less has been written about the Morrill Act of 1890, which made possible the establishment of separate Black land-grant institutions in the southern and border states, where the majority of Black people lived before the 1st World War. Though it is called the "2nd Morrill Act", no one would seriously contend that it achieved monetarily for Black land-grant institutions anything comparable to what the 1862 legislation accomplished for other land-grant institutions. The "separate but equal" principle, even if it had been faithfully adhered to, could never have created black land-grant institutions in the southern and border states as financially secure as the land-grant institutions that developed with the help of the 1862 act: these states simply were not generous in their appropriations for state-supported education. So long as college education was uncommon (which it was until well into the twentieth century) and so long as even high school education was not an occupational requirement (note that only about fifteen percent of the age group fourteen to seventeen was enrolled in high school even as late as 1910), it was possible to ignore the very substantial differences that existed between the educational opportunities available to White people and those available to Black people. After the Second World War, high school and college education became common among White Youth while the overwhelming majority of Black youth were still excluded from the college option. It was then that the full extent of the financial discrimination against Black higher educational institutions became apparent.