Trump Shifts $435M to HBCUs As Other Minority-Serving Colleges Lose Funding

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An NAACP flyer campaigning for the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, which passed the U.S. House of Representatives in 1922, but was filibustered to defeat in the Senate. Dyer, the NAACP, and freedom fighters around the country, like Flossie Baily, struggled for years to get the Dyer and other anti-lynching bills passed, to no avail. Today there is still no U.S. law specifically against lynching. In 2005, eighty of the 100 U.S. Senators voted for a resolution to apologize to victims' families and the country for their failure to outlaw lynching. Courtesy of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

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Claude, age 23, just months before his 1930 murder. Courtesy of Faith Deeter.

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September 16, 2025

Alecia Taylor, CapitalB

The Department of Education announced the funding boost just days after cutting $350 million from other grants.

Bethune-cookman university — Bethune-Cookman University is one of the schools to receive such a call (2C2KPhotography, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

The Trump administration said it will redirect $435 million to historically Black colleges and universities and tribal campuses as it defunds grant programs for other minority students at other institutions.

On Monday, the Department of Education also announced it will invest more than $160 million in American history and civics education programs. The department said it also plans to award grants totaling $500 million for charter schools.

This week’s announcement comes less than a week after the department said it will end approximately $350 million in discretionary funding to several minority-serving institutions that “discriminate by conferring government benefits exclusively to institutions that meet racial or ethnic quotas.”

Among institutions defunded are Hispanic-serving institutions and predominantly Black institutions, which are different from HBCUs. HBCUs are colleges and universities founded before 1964 with the intention to serve Black communities. PBIs are campuses with about half the student body identifying as Black or African American, such as Chicago State University, Georgia State University, and the Community College of Philadelphia.

Read about how organizations are reacting to this news.

Many HBCUs were established in response to segregation during the Jim Crow Era.

Follow our breaking news page to see how the current administration is impacting Black Americans.

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