A group of former and current students of Lincoln University (LU)  of Missouri on Wednesday sued the state of Missouri, alleging that the state’s intentional withholding of funds continues to perpetuate a history of “racially segregated higher education.”

The LU plaintiffs argue that the state has “appropriated less per student to Lincoln than to the University of Missouri, and that conditioned Lincoln’s receipt of statutorily mandated matching funds on performance criteria never applied in equivalent form to the University of Missouri.” The federal government purportedly exacerbated this problem by shortening LU nearly $361,600,000 between fiscal years 1987 and 2020.

The plaintiffs say they have seen firsthand the harms that result from the state’s actions, including “failing infrastructure, inadequate nutrition, and absent support services.” Another says that she “could not enroll in the introductory course for her major because the single section was full,” and she “lost fifteen pounds in her first semester because the dining hall closed before her band practice ended.”

The complaint traces Missouri’s history of underfunding LU while wholly satisfying the match requirement for the University of Missouri, a predominately white school, without imposing contingencies:

Missouri’s underfunding was intentional. It was not the incidental result of a race-neutral policy applied even-handedly. The State fully matched the University of Missouri’s land-grant allocations every year without condition while conditioning Lincoln’s on performance criteria. The State’s own agents at Lincoln University told students in the 1990s that the land-grant money would not come because Lincoln was not the University of Missouri.

In 2022, Missouri lawmakers voted to allocate the full state match that LU would need to receive the maximum amount of federal land-grant funding available. In 2021, LU received only a 50 percent match—only $4.9 million of the required $9.75 million—”only the second time the university had received as much as a 50% match from the state since 2000.” Because of the state’s shortcoming, LU had to use at least $43 million of its own funds from 2000 to 2016 to satisfy the match requirement.

Missouri has a lengthy track record of legally mandated segregated education. Although the Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education formally ended segregation in public education, Missouri did not amend its statutes mandating separate schools until 1976.

In 2023, the US Departments of Education and Agriculture called on 16 states to remedy the “over $12 billion disparity in funding between land-grant Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and their non-HBCU land-grant peers in their states.” LU was founded in 1854 and is one of two HBCUs in Missouri.

The plaintiffs are seeking compensatory damages for their personal educational and economic injuries under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and declaratory and injunctive relief against Missouri under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.