HBCU students sue Missouri for $549M, citing underfunding

Current and former students at Lincoln University of Missouri filed a lawsuit Wednesday alleging the state has underfunded the institution for decades.

The students want the state to pay almost $549 million to a fund that would go toward campus repairs and other university needs.

The case centers around a law that requires certain state money to go to land-grant universities. In 2023, the Biden administration found multiple states, including Missouri, held back funding for historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs).

While the state raised the funds for the university in 2022, the lawsuit contends that it was not enough.

Lincoln University, which was not named in the lawsuit, said it has no comment on the new legal challenge.

The lawsuit states that Missouri “for more than three decades, withheld from Lincoln University the state funding that federal law required as a condition of the federal land-grant money Missouri accepted, and did so on a basis traceable to Missouri’s prior de jure system of racially segregated higher education.”

The Missouri governor’s office said it “does not have a comment at this time.”

The lawsuit also alleges Lincoln University was treated differently than the University of Missouri, another land-grant school, which received its full funding from the Show Me State.

“For decades, Missouri underfunded Lincoln compared with the University of Missouri and failed to provide the full state match required for Lincoln’s federal land-grant funding. That disparity has had real consequences for Lincoln’s students, faculty, classrooms, laboratories, and campus,” said Don Calloway, lead counsel for the plaintiffs.

“Our clients are asking the court for a meaningful remedy for that historic underfunding and a permanent commitment that Missouri will fully and fairly match Lincoln’s federal land-grant funds going forward,” he added. “Lincoln was built by Black soldiers who invested their own pay to create an institution that has served Missouri for 160 years. The State should honor that legacy.”