Black-Only Scholarship Dumped After Anti-Affirmative Action Win

Affirmative action strikes again as a lawsuit from a legal organization resulted in a scholarship for Black students being dumped at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), all by citing legislation put in place to protect African-Americans, Inside Higher Ed reported. 

Pacific Legal Foundation, known for filing lawsuits to end affirmative action in public education, targeted a scholarship for Black students, Black Alumni Scholarship Fund (BASF), at the university by using the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, passed to protect African Americans, in an effort to halt the financial aid program geared towards helping only Black students. 

The conservative group was victorious, as the scholarship was renamed the Goins Alumni Scholarship Fund (GASF) in honor of scholarship founder Lennon Goins. It is also open to students of all demographics, with the website — rebranded from basf-sandiego.com to gasf-sandiego.com — stating that applications will be sent to any students who identify “on the UC application as Black or African American.” 

Pacific Legal celebrated the win, praising the KKK Act for coming in handy. 

“I think that the lawsuit fulfilled the promise of what the law was intended to do,” an attorney in the firm’s equality and opportunity practice group, Jack Brown, said. A spokesperson from the Foundation said it is “pleased that this lawsuit was amicably resolved” while being “committed to complying with all federal and state anti-discrimination laws.”

The law was signed by President Ulysses S. Grant to protect the 14th Amendment after the white supremacist group launched “one of the worst campaigns of domestic terrorism in American history” in South Carolina. After the Civil War ended in 1865, several states modified the 14th Amendment to include freed slaves. It states that states can’t “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law,” or deny anyone “the equal protection of the laws.”

In response, klansmen targeted Black people and white Republicans, including rape and murder, in an effort to reconstruct the government. That same legislation is now being used against the demographic it was created to protect. 

In collaboration with the Californians for Equal Rights Foundation (CFER), one of its members — a white transfer student —became a plaintiff in Pacific Legal’s case. CFER argued that several “Asian-American high school members who plan to apply to UCSD” could be excluded if it is geared toward Black students only. “I think the law was intended to kind of fulfill the promise of the Declaration of Independence, that all Americans are created equal,” Brown said. 

“That’s true whether you’re white, whether you’re Black, whether you’re Asian or what have you.”

According to The College Fix, legal experts labeled the organization’s victory as “a novel legal strategy that could be used to challenge similar programs.” 

The successful scholarship program lasted 42 years, awarding more than $1 million to over 400 black UCSD students pursuing degrees in engineering, math, science, and technology.

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