nd not another because of some immutable characteristic of the first group? This issue can be divided into two questions: (1) Was there government action? (2) Did this action discriminate? The answer to the second question is usually the main focus of an inquiry. With regard to HBCs, the answer is yes but there may have been a legally valid reason for the discrimination. This has been the main focus of court cases involving HBCs and will be the main focus of this chapter.
However, the first question is important for establishing the setting of the discrimination. Throughout most of the post-bellum period, discrimination only ran afoul of equal protection if it resulted from some government action. This did not mean that the government had to actively engage in the discrimination, but that the actor engaged in the discrimination was somehow acting under the color of government. This often meant that the actor was receiving financial support from the government.
This is an important issue for colleges because equal protection laws could only be applied to those colleges which were either public colleges or receiving some sort of assistance from the state and/or federal governments. Prior to the Civil War, there were very few public colleges in the United States. This changed with the enactment of the First Morrill Act in 1862. This act provided federal land grants to each state for the purpose of endowing higher education institutions for the education of the middle and working classes. This was an attempt to alter the elitist nature of higher education in the United States.
As a result of the First Morrill Act, land grant colleges became the main source of higher education in the United States until the last half of the Twentieth Century. However, the First Morrill Act did not address the issue of higher education for blacks in the United States. Seventeen states required segregation of the white and black popul...