Dr. Crystal R. Sanders, Associate Professor of African American Studies and associated faculty in the History Department, was recently interviewed in the publication Black Perspectives. Sanders discusses her most recent book, A Forgotten Migration: Black Southerners, Segregation Scholarships, and the Debt Owed to Public HBCUs (UNC Press, 2024), with Ashley Everson, a managing editor of Global Black Thought. A Forgotten Migration has won multiple awards since its release, including the 2025 Pauli Murray Book Prize. Read an excerpt from the interview below and find the full conversation here.

“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.“