Separate but Equal The history of African Americans in higher education directly relates to the manner minorities were historically treated in the US society. Prior to the emergence of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960’s, the concept of “separate but equal“ which was upheld by the Court’s decision on Plessy v. Ferguson case in 1896 and which dominated in multiple spheres – the major population did not believe in social integration but allowed minorities to live their lives without interfering with “white business” including education (Masters, n.d., p. 163). In 1954, the US Supreme Court first recognized that the doctrine of “separate but equal” should not be present in the system of public education and expressed the idea of racially integrated society and provision of equal opportunities in its opinion on the case of Brown v. Board of Education (Washburn, 1994). In its conclusion on the case, the Supreme Court stated that integrated schools are potentially more effective in providing a better education for diverse students. Although the constitutional mandate of Brown and some other legal cases substantially supported the positive changes in the educational system and provoked the increase in representation of black students in education, at the end of the 20th century, there were many disparities in wealth distribution between blacks and whites which maintained from one generation to another (Oliver & Shapiro, 1995). The controversies between the positive perspective on integrated education associated with multiple benefits and the persistent hostility between different racial populations correlated with socially unequal practices continue to challenge the treatment of racial problems in colleges even today. The Civil Rights Movement Throughout the 1950’s and 1960’s, the Civil Rights Movement was gaining momentum, and such well-educated leaders like Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and others fought for equal opportunities for African Americans and demolition of Jim Crow regime (Masters, n.d.). According to Morris (1999), the major prerequisites of the Civil Rights Movement and the consequent changes in the education system are related to the internal development of the Black community and the spread of African American citizens across the southern and northern cities. As the struggle for equality provoked some advances in the US education system and policies, the first African American students – James Meredith, Vivian Malone, and James Hood, – enrolled in historically white colleges (Masters, n.d.). Nevertheless, they faced a lot of verbal and physical harassment indicating that the hostility ingrained in the social mindset cannot be erased overnight. Partially due to the hardships the black students faced in the desegregated colleges at the initial stages of racial integration in education, some educators and researchers suggested that the southern racially identifiable schools which provided a supportive environment for African American students were better for them (Washburn, 1994). Since in this way, some predominantly black colleges, e.g., in Mississippi Valley State, continued the unconstitutional practice of segregation, the state authorities proposed a plan to attract more white students to campuses and balance diverse student populations by developing new programs (Washburn, 1994). At the same time, the analysis of statistics collected throughout the period between 1976 and 2004 reveals