A Forgotten Migration: An Interview with Crystal R. Sanders
In today’s post, Ashley Everson, a managing editor of Global Black Thought, interviews Crystal R. Sanders, Associate Professor of African American Studies at Emory University, about her most recent book, A Forgotten Migration: Black Southerners, Segregation Scholarships, and the Debt Owed to Public HBCUs. The book was selected as the winning title for the 2025 Pauli Murray Book Prize as well as several others, including the 2025 Lillian Smith Book Award and the 2025 Outstanding Publication Award, American Educational Research Association.
Dr. Sanders is an award-winning historian of the United States in the twentieth century. Her latest book, A Forgotten Migration: Black Southerners, Segregation Scholarships, and the Debt Owed to Public HBCUs, explores the long history of racial inequality in higher education through the postbaccalaureate experiences of African Americans during the Jim Crow era. She introduces readers to “segregation scholarships,” a little-known scheme birthed in the South that undermined the letter and spirit of the legal doctrine of “separate but equal,” and created the funding inequity in our nation’s colleges and universities that is still prevalent today. She is also the author of A Chance for Change: Head Start and Mississippi’s Black Freedom Struggle published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2016. Sanders’s work can also be found in many of the leading history journals including the Journal of Southern History, the North Carolina Historical Review, and the Journal of African American History. Sanders is an associate professor of African American Studies at Emory University where she teaches courses on civil rights history, Black women’s history, and the history of Black education.
Ashley Everson: One of the major contributions of A Forgotten Migration is the concept of educational migration—a form of forced movement to the Northeast and Midwest United States that unfolded alongside the Great Migration. Unlike Black southerners who fled the South in search of economic opportunity, Black students were pushed out by Southern states that feared the disruptive potential of a growing educated Black professional class (6). Why do you think this particular migration has remained so overlooked or omitted in dominant narratives of Civil Rights and migration history?
Crystal R. Sanders: I believe that the educational migration story I tell has been largely overlooked and/or omitted from dominant narratives of both civil rights and migration history because this story does not neatly fit the usual geographical, chronological, or conceptual frameworks used to understand Black freedom struggles. This is both a pre-and post-World War II narrative that takes place throughout the United States. Moreover, this is not a Black migration story of Black southerners leaving the region for the “warmth other suns.” The overwhelming majority of segregation scholarship recipients always intended to return to the South after completing their degree programs. Finally, with respect to civil rights and Black educational studies, this is not a story about desegregating public elementary or secondary institutions. A Forgotten Migration is about Black southerners demanding provision for graduate study based on the legal doctrine of separate but equal. In doing so, segregation scholarship recipients made citizenship demands of southern state governments though the national NAACP did not support this arrangement as many of the organization’s leaders felt that the tuition assistance was akin to implicitly supporting segregation.
Everson: Methodologically, you draw from a rich array of sources—newspapers, university archives, oral histories, court records, and Black organizational documents—to reconstruct the white supremacist infrastructure behind segregation scholarships. How did you decide which narratives and vignettes to center in the book? Were there compelling stories or findings that you ultimately chose not to include, and if so, why?
Sanders: Sixteen southern and border states established segregation scholarship programs during the age of Jim Crow. In the book, I aimed to give readers an idea of the diversity in the origins, policies, and magnitude of segregation scholarship programs by focusing in-depth on four states that offered a compelling representative sampling. That said, all sixteen states are included in some way whether by going in-depth about the law school experience of Fred Gray of Alabama or simply mentioning the roadblocks that Myrlie Beasley-Evers of Mississippi faced while pursuing her highest intellectual potential. For every story told, there were five stories that I could not tell. One segregation scholarship recipient not mentioned in the book is noted civil rights leader Aaron Henry of Mississippi. The Magnolia State subsidized his education at Xavier University where he studied pharmacy since he could not study at the University of Mississippi’s pharmacy school because of his race. In his last two years of school, he received tuition assistance from the State of Mississippi, which supplemented the financial support he received from the GI Bill. While having to leave the state for the same opportunities that white Mississippians had in-state was bad enough, even graduating became an obstacle for Henry. Xavier required students to participate in commencement exercises to receive their degrees but the New Orleans schools’ graduation was the exact same day as the pharmacy board examinations in Oxford, Mississippi. The Mississippi native had every intention of being a pharmacist in his home state so missing the exams was out of the question. To be in two different states on the same day, immediately after walking across the stage in June 1950, Henry caught a flight to Memphis and then a friend drove him to Oxford. When pharmacy board exam results were made public, Henry had scored the third highest grade. He opened a pharmacy in Clarksdale and that business would become a vital space for civil rights organizing.
Everson: You define intellectual warfare as the subversive act of acquiring knowledge to challenge and dismantle segregation—a theme that runs powerfully throughout your work. You document how Black graduate students asserted their rights to full citizenship through the pursuit of postsecondary education, often at great financial, physical, and emotional costs for themselves, their families, and communities. What do you see as the enduring legacy of this tradition of intellectual warfare for subsequent generations of Black graduate students? And how might today’s Black scholars continue to build on this legacy within institutions that remain sites of both opportunity and exclusion?
Sanders: I believe that succeeding generations of Black scholars carry on the tradition of intellectual warfare by matriculating and studying at institutions that are sometimes hostile to their very presence, yet they stay the course and produce scholarship that is groundbreaking and corrective. Noted historian Dr. Helen G. Edmonds practiced intellectual warfare by challenging dominant narratives about the 1898 Wilmington coup. Following in her footsteps, historians such as Erica Armstrong Dunbar and Deirdre Cooper Owens have written compelling histories about the experiences of Black women that have made the public rethink the legacies of George Washington and J. Marion Sims, respectively. I am confident that up-and-coming scholars will take inspiration from those who have come before them and pursue scholarly projects that bear witness to past struggles and ongoing challenges.
Everson: In the book, you detail how Jim Crow-era “segregation scholarships”—meant to fund Black students forced to attend out-of-state or private institutions—often only covered the difference in tuition between those schools and their in-state counterparts. But you also show how these scholarships were frequently tied to classist reimbursement policies or delayed disbursements, creating immense financial and psychological strain for students. Do you interpret these patterns as subversive strategies by the state to further undermine Black students’ likelihood of attaining professional degrees once they were enrolled in private or non-South state universities, or do you see them as examples of bureaucratic dysfunction? Or perhaps both?
Sanders: I think the financial and psychological strains that segregation scholarship recipients experienced were the result of both white state lawmakers’ lack of interest in Black graduate and professional school education AND bureaucratic dysfunction though the latter problem was a byproduct of the former.
During the age of Jim Crow, especially, many white people saw educated African Americans as a threat to the racial status quo so there was no enthusiasm or adequate financial appropriation to assist African Americans in pursuing postbaccalaureate degrees. That is why segregation scholarship programs were never funded sufficiently and demand always exceeded supply.
Moreover, to stymie Black intellectual pursuits, lawmakers erected all kinds of bureaucratic hurdles in hopes that students might give up. Spoiler alert: Black southerners were resolute in demanding that their southern state governments make provision for them to pursue graduate study.
Everson: Your work builds on the foundational scholarship of historians like Stephanie Evans and Jelani Favors in the study of Black higher education. What conversations within the field are you hoping to spark, expand, or deepen through A Forgotten Migration? And how do you see your work pushing the boundaries of existing narratives in this area of study?
Sanders: Scholars such as Jelani Favors, Stephanie Evans, and Deondra Rose have beautifully documented the ways in which historically Black colleges and universities have transformed the world by producing generations of alumni whose commitment to freedom, equality, and democracy have challenged empires and altered societies. There is no question that these institutions have always punched above their weight class, doing so underfunded and oftentimes neglected by state and federal authorities. I am hopeful that my work furthers conversations about the real and great financial debt owed to public HBCUs. Not only have these institutions never been funded at levels equal to state flagship institutions, but also border and southern state governments knowingly and willfully took badly needed resources from these schools. As I show in the book, many southern and border states paid for their segregation scholarship programs by taking money out of their already underfunded public Black colleges. For example, in Tennessee, lawmakers created a segregation scholarship program after William Redmond Jr., a twenty-seven-year-old Black man, applied for admission to the University of Tennessee Pharmacy School in 1936. The authorizing legislation for Tennessee’s segregation scholarship program detailed that scholarships were “payable out of the state appropriations made for the Agricultural and Industrial College for Negroes” (present-day Tennessee State University). Robbing Peter to pay Paul, legislators placed the burden of financing African Americans’ out-of-state graduate study on an already cash-strapped public Black college.
Today, Tennessee State University finds itself in a financial crisis not of its own making. In 2023, the Biden Administration found that the state of Tennessee underfunded Tennessee State University by $2.1 BILLION from 1987 to 2020. When we add the segregation scholarship money taken from the university from the 1930s until the 1960s, the debt is much larger. It is past time for southern and border state governments to correct the financial harm inflicted on public HBCUs. Given all that Black institutions have accomplished while underfunded, just imagine what is possible when the debt is paid.
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