Lincoln U Students, Alumni Sue Missouri for $549M

A group of current and former Lincoln University students filed a federal lawsuit Wednesday against the state of Missouri, seeking $548.7 million owed to the Black land-grant institution for funds the state neglected to allocate to the university between 1987 and 2020, plus interest.

The filing marks the beginning of a campaign by a group called the 1890 Project to seek repayment of the $12.6 billion of documented underfunding of historically Black land-grant colleges in 16 states. Donald Calloway Jr., the group’s lead attorney, said they will pursue repayment through litigation, negotiation and legislation.

The lawsuit argues that seven current and former Lincoln University students suffered personal and professional damages as a result of the chronic underfunding. The plaintiffs said they experienced inadequate infrastructure in dorms and academic buildings, limited hours at a dining hall that provided mostly unhealthy food, and insufficient student support services.

If Lincoln had received fair funding between 1987 and 2020, as mandated by federal law, the money would have gone toward better facilities and more opportunities, Calloway said.

The lawsuit alleges that the state violated the students’ 14th Amendment rights by failing to enforce both the 1890 law, which requires states to equitably fund historically Black-land grant colleges and the existing land-grant institutions that then only allowed white students, and their violated civil rights by discriminating based on race. The current and former students are asking for the $548.7 million to be paid back with federal supervision, as well as a plan to ensure equal funding for Lincoln University in the future.

“The reality is, the harm inflicted upon Lincoln or Southern or each one of these individual [institutions] is, when you look at it at scale, indicative of harm inflicted over Black America,” Calloway said. “[The underfunding] has affected the lives of generations of African Americans throughout the South.”

The lawsuit names the state of Missouri; Gov. Mike Kehoe; the state higher education coordinating board; Bennett Boggs, commissioner of higher education; and Mun Y. Choi, the president of the University of Missouri system, the state’s 1862—that is, predominantly white—land-grant institution. Through a spokesperson, Kehoe declined to comment on the pending litigation.

Momentum toward the lawsuit has been building for years. In 2023, the Biden administration wrote to the governors of 16 of the 19 states with historically Black land-grant institutions to highlight the value of the institutions, calling for the repayment of the funds—calculated on a per-student basis—over time. The letter to Missouri’s then-governor, Mike Parson, said the state had underfunded Lincoln University by more than $361 million over three decades.

“These funds could have supported infrastructure and student services and would have better positioned the university to compete for research grants,” the administration wrote. “Lincoln University has been able to make remarkable strides and would be much stronger and better positioned to serve its students, your state, and the nation if made whole with respect to this funding gap.”

The letters to all 16 states were previously available on the federal Education Department website but appear to have been removed at some point in the past six weeks. ED did not respond to a request to clarify whether the letters had been relocated to a different site or removed altogether. (Inside Higher Ed was able to find them on the Wayback Machine.)

Burst Pipes, Salty Food

In the lawsuit, Makhi Joseph Berinyuy Jaff, a plaintiff who attended Lincoln in 2023 and 2024, said he was assigned to a residence hall built in 1963, where he at times experienced cold water and faulty water pressure in the restrooms. He also reported that while living in the dorm, a pipe burst and “caused fecal matter to disperse throughout the building.” Across campus, he alleged, students experienced Wi-Fi outages, exposed pipes and broken brick walls. In the dining hall, he said, students were served undercooked meat as well as food with low nutritional value and high sodium content. He left Lincoln without a degree and is currently working for an hourly wage of $15, according to the lawsuit.

Jaydan Monee Ware, a current sophomore who serves as the student body treasurer, said in the lawsuit that she lost 15 pounds during her freshman year because the dining hall closed before her band practice ended.

“There’s a broad universe of demonstrable harm that affects the current students’ experience on campus,” Calloway said. And it extends to “alumni who are still competing in the workplace with a devalued degree, who have diminished earning power as a result of that devalued degree.”

Another plaintiff, Herbert J. Kitchen, is a great-great-grandson of one of the formerly enslaved soldiers who founded the university as the Lincoln Institute in 1866. As a Lincoln student in the 1980s, Kitchen said, outdated infrastructure in the dorms distracted him from his schoolwork and caused stress. He told Inside Higher Ed that the buildings’ heat only worked sometimes, and the water heater regularly gave out in the winter, meaning that he and the other students had to boil water in their dorm mother’s kitchen to wash their faces at night.

Kitchen said the university went through a number of presidents during his time there, which led to overall instability. He graduated from Lincoln in 1988 with a bachelor’s degree in marketing and went on to spend most of his career as a community college administrator in California. Still, he believes his degree doesn’t carry as much weight as it might have if Lincoln had been funded appropriately.

“The state of Missouri thought of Lincoln University as a stepchild,” Kitchen said. “Had the state of Missouri put Lincoln on the same playing field as the other schools, I believe Lincoln would have prospered.”

Calloway, the attorney, was elected to the Missouri House of Representatives in 2009 and served one term—which took place during the identified period of Lincoln’s underfunding, from 1987 to 2020, according to the lawsuit. That means he was part of the State Legislature that failed to fund Lincoln equitably. He noted the irony of his current fight against the state for those funds, but said his experience as a lawmaker gives him some insight into how the underfunding went on for so long.

“I think a lot of the legislators, as well as attorneys general and governors and commissioners of higher education, have just accepted the funding mechanisms and the funding scheme that they were given without really questioning it,” Calloway said. “You just kind of rubber-stamp and pass it along. Very few people take the opportunity to examine why things are set up as they are. Even if they do examine it and realize there’s some fundamental unfairness there, a lot of folks don’t want to upset the apple cart for a variety of reasons.”