This story was produced by the Tennessee Lookout and WPLN News, with support from the Pulitzer Center and the Education Writers Association.
After the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis sparked nationwide protests about racial injustice in 2020, the Tennessee Legislature formed a committee to answer a question: How much do we owe Tennessee State University?
TSU was created in the early 1900s as a land grant university for Black residents who weren’t allowed to attend the state’s other land grant university, the University of Tennessee. This was not unusual: Every Southern state founded at least one Black public university, as part of their efforts to maintain segregation while remaining eligible for federal funds.
These universities were all poorly funded by their state governments throughout the Jim Crow era. And even after, states often continued to shortchange their historically Black universities. But the exact amount of underfunding is vast, hard to calculate, and even harder to make a political case for.
Here are four ways to make that calculation.
State land grant funds since 1957: $544 million
Because TSU was created as a land grant school, it’s entitled to money from the federal government to fund certain programs related to science and agriculture. The state is then legally required to match those funds.
Rep. Harold Love, D-Nashville, spoke on the House floor in 2016 about the state’s ongoing failure to match those funds for TSU’s land grant programs. The legislature agreed to start matching the funds from that year forward, but Love wanted the state to rectify the previous years of underfunding.
He then chaired the bipartisan Joint Land-Grant Institution Funding Study Committee, which sought to tally how much the state owed TSU. According to a report by the Office of Legislative Budget Analysis, the state failed to allocate any land grant funds to TSU from fiscal year 1957 through 2007. The University of Tennessee, however, did receive its full state match and sometimes even more than what was federally required.
The committee calculated the total sum owed as between $150 million and $544 million. (The difference depended on which ratio the state used to determine how much federal land grant funding was allocated to TSU compared to UT.) These numbers did not account for inflation. The legislature later budgeted $250 million in backpay for TSU.
State land grant funds before 1957: Unknown
Love says he still wants to know how much state funding for TSU’s land grant programs was missing before 1957. Those budget books weren’t in the legislative library when Love was researching the funding a few years ago, he says, but he has since found the records. He has not yet finished the calculations.
Love says asking for additional back pay would require some political strategy. He declined to say whether he would bring it up in the state legislature in early 2026.
”I would probably work on the rest of the $544 (million) first,” he said. “It’s been my experience that people like to get one thing and then move to the next.”
Per-pupil spending since 1987: $2.1 billion
In 2023, the Biden administration shared a vastly different calculation: Instead of looking specifically at land grant funding, it researched how much Tennessee spent per pupil at its two land grant universities since 1987, based on their overall state allocations and enrollment.
It found that the state spent significantly more on each UT student compared to each TSU student, for a total financial gap of $2.1 billion. While the disparity is not necessarily illegal, it is a meaningful indication of how much the state has invested in the students at each of its two land grant universities.
Biden’s education secretary, Miguel Cardona, urged Tennessee at the time to make “a substantial state allocation” in addition to doubling its land grant matching money going forward. Although the $2.1 billion figure became a rallying cry on TSU’s campus, Republican lawmakers in Tennessee quickly dismissed the Biden administration’s calculation as a “political number.” It has not gained additional traction in the state legislature.
Segregation scholarships in the ‘30s-’60s: $8 billion
Crystal Sanders, a professor of African American studies at Emory University, identified another slice of funding that was taken from many public HBCUs around the South from the 1920s to the 1960s. During segregation, Black students couldn’t attend predominately white institutions, and Black universities had limited options for graduate programs.
So Tennessee passed a law in 1937 saying that the state would pay for Black students to go to graduate schools out of state — and would pull the money directly from TSU’s budget. This worsened the financial strain on public HBCUs that were already struggling with poor state funding.
“We can clearly see how these institutions are being robbed, literally robbed, to preserve segregation,” Sanders said.
Sanders found the budget books that show how much money the state spent on each Black graduate student. She estimates that, with inflation, Tennessee owes TSU about $8 billion to account for the funds it took from the school for segregation scholarships.
It’s a large sum, but Sanders believes using historical records to make a calculation is pivotal to making the political case for repayment. “ You can say, here are my receipts. This is what I’m owed,” she says. “This is not how I feel on Monday, and maybe my opinion’s going to change on Thursday. … This is about a debt that the state owes, and states have to pay their debts.”
This is Part 4 of The Debt. Read Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 here.
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