A group of current and former students at a historically Black university sued Missouri for nearly $549 million on Wednesday, arguing that the state spent decades illegally underfunding their school.
The case, which centers on Lincoln University in Jefferson City, will test a 19th century federal law that envisioned equitable public financing for institutions that were created as havens for Black Americans in a segregated country. And the litigation comes as many historically Black colleges and universities struggle with enrollment, student retention and finances.
“The ramifications of the underfunding are very present today, and so just because it goes back some time doesn’t mean that we don’t have an obligation to fix it,” Don Calloway, a former Missouri legislator who is representing the plaintiffs in the case, said in an interview. “It is a very clear breach of the state’s statutory and contractual obligation.”
Missouri officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment about the suit, which names the state, its higher education board and three officials as defendants. Lincoln University, which is not a party to the case, also did not immediately respond.
The dispute stems from laws dating to the 1800s that first created land-grant universities, which benefited from significant federal support. But states routinely failed to meet their legal obligations to provide equitable funding for schools intended for Black students, which limited the ability of the H.B.C.U.s to receive matching federal dollars.
In 2023, the Biden administration said that 16 states, including Missouri, had collectively shortchanged their H.B.C.U.s by more than $12 billion. Delaware and Ohio were the only states meeting their legal obligations, administration officials said.
Missouri — where Republicans have controlled both the governor’s office and legislature since 2017 — first helped Lincoln University receive its full matching funds in 2022. But Wednesday’s case contends that the university missed out on hundreds of millions of dollars over the previous decades.
The toll, the suit says, was a campus in deep disrepair and with inadequate academic infrastructure. The university had about 2,200 students this past spring semester, far less than H.B.C.U. powerhouses like Howard University and North Carolina A&T University.
The lawsuit argues that the funding disparities were not accidental. The state, it said, had long tied matching funding for Lincoln to performance criteria that it did not similarly impose on the University of Missouri — the state’s first land-grant school, which did not admit Black students until 1950.
Citing the state’s more recent moves to help Lincoln receive its full matching funding, the suit asserts that “Missouri’s own conduct confirms that its decades of noncompliance were a matter of choice, not fiscal incapacity.”
The lawsuit seeks almost $549 million — including about $325 million in interest — for a Lincoln-focused fund that would be overseen by an appointee of the court known as a special master. The money would be limited to purposes like campus repairs, faculty positions and student services. At least 20 percent of the money, the lawsuit proposes, would underpin a new endowment fund.
The lawsuit proposes that Missouri pay any court-ordered amount over a period no longer than three fiscal years. In the current fiscal year, Missouri’s state budget adds up to about $51 billion.
Mr. Calloway was undaunted by the notion that Missouri might struggle to find such a gigantic sum.
“The State of Missouri committed a tangible violation,” he said, adding, “We think the state is responsible for coming up with the judgment by any means necessary.”
The Biden administration’s calculations in 2023 most directly seeded the lawsuit. But an executive order that President Trump signed last year helped attract somewhat more bipartisan concern to the issue. In the order, Mr. Trump said that his administration’s H.B.C.U. initiative should be “encouraging states to provide the required state matching funds.”
There is some precedent for states making up for funding disparities to historically Black schools. In 2001, after decades of litigation that included a turn before the U.S. Supreme Court, Mississippi agreed to a settlement that ultimately steered more than $500 million to H.B.C.U.s in the state.
And in 2021, Maryland reached a $577 million settlement over H.B.C.U. funding.
Mr. Calloway, himself a graduate of an H.B.C.U. in Alabama, said he was preparing for litigation in other states.
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