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A Forgotten Migration tells the little-known story of "segregation scholarships" awarded by states in the US South to Black students seeking graduate education in the pre–Brown v. Board of Education era. Under the Plessy v. Ferguson decision, decades earlier, southern states could provide graduate opportunities for African Americans by creating separate but equal graduate programs at tax-supported Black colleges or by admitting Black students to historically white institutions. Most did neither and instead paid to send Black students out of state for graduate education.
Crystal R. Sanders examines Black graduate students who relocated to the North, Midwest, and West to continue their education with segregation scholarships, revealing the many challenges they faced along the way. Students that entered out-of-state programs endured long and tedious travel, financial hardship, racial discrimination, isolation, and homesickness. With the passage of Brown in 1954, segregation scholarships began to wane, but the integration of graduate programs at southern public universities was slow. In telling this story, Sanders demonstrates how white efforts to preserve segregation led to the underfunding of public Black colleges, furthering racial inequality in American higher education.
About the Author
Crystal R. Sanders is an award-winning historian of the United States in the twentieth century. Her research and teaching interests include African American History, Black Women's History, Civil Rights History, and the History of Black Education. She received her BA (cum laude) in History and Public Policy from Duke University and a Ph.D. in History from Northwestern University. Before coming to Emory, she was an Associate Professor of History at Pennsylvania State University.
Professor Sanders is the author of A Chance for Change: Head Start and Mississippi's Black Freedom Struggle, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2016 and A Forgotten Migration: Black Southerners, Segregation Scholarships, and the Debt Owed to Public HBCUs, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2024. A Chance for Change won the 2017 Critics' Choice Award from the American Educational Studies Association and the 2017 New Scholar's Book Award from Division F of the American Educational Research Association. A Chance for Change was also a finalist for the 2016 Hooks National Book Award. Professor Sanders’ work can also be found in many of the leading history journals, including the Journal of Southern History, the North Carolina Historical Review, and the Journal of African American History.
Professor Sanders is the recipient of a host of fellowships and prizes. These honors include the C. Vann Woodward Prize from the Southern Historical Association, the Huggins-Quarles Award from the Organization of American Historians, an Andrew Mellon Graduate Fellowship in Humanistic Studies, a Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship, a National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellowship, a National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship, a Visiting Scholars Fellowship at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Anthony Kaye Fellowship at the National Humanities Center. In 2021, the American Historical Association awarded her its Equity Award.
Professor Sanders currently serves as the Assistant Editor of the Journal of African American History.
About the Moderator
Joseph Crespino is the Jimmy Carter Professor of History at Emory University. He is an expert in the political and cultural history of the twentieth century United States, and of the history of the American South since Reconstruction.
His research has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Academy of Education.
In 2014, he served as the Fulbright Distinguished Chair in American Studies at the University of Tubingen, and he has been named a Distinguished Lecturer by the Organization of American Historians.
Crespino has published three books, has co-edited a collection of essays, and has written for academic journals as well as for popular forums such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, Politico, and the Wall Street Journal. His most recent book; Atticus Finch: The Biography—Harper Lee, Her Father, and the Making of an American Icon; was published in 2018 by Basic Books. Among his current book projects, Crespino is writing the chapters covering United States history in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries for the textbook America: A Narrative History, co-written with David Emory Shi, Daina Ramey Berry, and Amy Murrell Taylor, published by W.W. Norton.
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