Dr. Crystal R. Sanders, Associate Professor of African American Studies and Associated Faculty in the History Department, recently published A Forgotten Migration: Black Southerners, Segregation Scholarships, and the Debt Owed to Public HBCUs with UNC Press. The book chronicles the little-known history of “segregation scholarships,” a pre–Brown v. Board of Education practice wherein southern states paid to send Black students out of state for graduate education instead of creating separate but equal graduate programs at tax-supported Black colleges or by admitting Black students to historically white institutions. A finalist for the 2025 Association for the Study of African American Life and History Book Prize, A Forgotten Migration was also the focus of a recent piece in Forbes. Read an excerpt from that piece, in which Sanders explains the genesis of the project, along with the full article: “A History Of ‘Segregation Scholarships’ And The Impact On HBCUs.”

“Growing up in rural North Carolina, I noticed that many of the retired Black public school teachers in my church had master’s degrees from NYU and Columbia University’s Teachers College. Quick math let me know that they had earned these degrees in the late 1940s and early 1950s. I asked my father why these women had chosen to go so far away for graduate school and he answered my question with a question: ‘Did they really have a choice?’” Sanders elaborated, “My dad’s comments stayed with me and I began exploring the credentials of Black public school teachers in the decades before desegregation and realized that Black teachers all over the South seemed to have these degrees from northeastern and midwest institutions.”