Fifty years ago, the 17 Black members of the House of Representatives launched the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, a policy research and educational institute aimed at empowering the Black community. Since 1988, the CBCF has awarded over $12 million in college scholarships to Black students in districts represented by Caucus members.
Last week, an organization that calls itself the American Alliance for Equal Rights filed a lawsuit arguing that the scholarship program violates federal civil rights law. “Racial discrimination is wrong no matter which group it favors or harms,” said the organization’s president, Edward Blum, in a press release.
If that name sounds familiar to you, it may be because the Edward Blum who runs the American Alliance for Equal Rights is the same Edward Blum who runs Students For Fair Admissions, the organization that won a Supreme Court ruling in 2023 striking down the race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard and University of North Carolina as unconstitutional discrimination. Evidently, just in case Black people still get admitted to college, Blum wants to make sure they can’t afford to go.
In the year following the SFFA decision, nearly 50 colleges and universities eliminated, paused, or altered race-conscious scholarship programs worth at least $45 million. Some did so preemptively, while others did so under pressure from Republican officials and activists like Blum, a retired stockbroker who has made a second career as a professionally aggrieved white man. Bankrolled by deep-pocketed conservative donors, Blum has brought dozens of lawsuits challenging programs designed to remedy discrimination in schools, workplaces, elections, and more.
Perversely, much of Blum’s litigation relies on laws that were also designed to remedy discrimination. His lawsuit against the CBCF claims that its scholarship violates the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which guarantees all Americans “the same right” to “make and enforce contracts.” Notably, the complaint omits the part of the statute that says its purpose is to ensure that all Americans have the same benefit of all laws “as is enjoyed by white citizens.” In other words, people of color must have the same rights and opportunities that white people have always had.
The complaint argues that the statute, best known as Section 1981, should apply to CBCF’s scholarships because the program is “contractual in nature.” And that “contract” is discriminatory, according to Blum, because eligibility depends on the race of the student and the race of their congressmember: Students must be Black and live in a district represented by a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, and those Congress members are, obviously, also Black. Blum additionally claims that, even if the CBC member requirement appears neutral, it is actually an illegal proxy for race with the purpose of selecting Black students, since over 40 percent of all Black Americans live in districts represented by CBC members.
A research center that tracks federal litigation related to diversity initiatives has identified at least 46 cases since 2021 attacking programs designed to help marginalized communities on Section 1981 grounds. Blum is directly involved in at least five of them. And his complaint in this case quips that the Congressional Black Caucus calls itself “Conscience of the Congress” while engaging in “unconscionable” racial discrimination.
Financial assistance is a critical tool for enabling Black people to go to school and stay in school. Black families have significantly less wealth than white families, which limits their ability to finance higher education, and causes Black students to take on more debt than white students—debt that’s difficult to pay back when Black college graduates make 10 percent less than their similarly situated white peers, according to 2019 data. In February 2024, Gallup polling data showed that 40 percent of Black students had recently considered withdrawing from their postsecondary programs, compared to 31 percent of their white peers. And 29 percent of those Black students said their top reason for considering stopping their coursework was cost.
That same year, Gallup surveyed adults who are not enrolled in higher education: 59 percent of Black adults said financial aid and scholarships would be “very important” to getting them to enroll within the next year, compared to 50 percent of white adults. Put simply, scholarships are uniquely important to Black people because they make higher education uniquely more affordable.
The CBCF’s individual financial awards range from $2,500 to $20,000, but the scholarships’ value is not just monetary. “For many recipients,” the Foundation’s website states, a CBC scholarship also represents “validation, visibility, and belief.” It is not enough for the conservative legal movement to go after the money—it wants to take these things away, too.
