A university scholarship named after George Floyd for Black students has resulted in a federal civil rights case.
The Equal Protection Project of the Legal Insurrection Foundation filed a complaint with the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights on Monday (March 25), as reported by College Fix.
The group contends that the George Floyd Memorial Scholarship at Minnesota’s North Central University violates Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 because it is solely available to Black students. Their complaint alleges that the university scholarship “engages in invidious discrimination on the basis of race, color, and national origin.”
North Central University President Scott Hagan established the George Floyd Memorial Scholarship in June 2020 to support the next generation of black American leaders. According to the scholarship’s information page, applicants must be “a student who is Black or African American, that is, a person having origins in any of the black racial groups of Africa.”
Equal Protection founder William Jacobson stated that the eligibility rules for the George Floyd Scholarship are plainly racially discriminatory. “Regardless of the purpose of the racial discrimination, it is wrong and unlawful.”
“NCU needs to come up with a remedial plan to compensate students shut out of the George Floyd Scholarship due to discrimination,” Jacobson said in a statement.
The Equal Protection Project also claims that the university is violating “the civil rights protections of Minnesota’s Human Rights Act, which makes it a criminal offense for an educational institution to limit access to any educational program on the basis of race,” according to the lawsuit.
Jacobson stated that the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn affirmative action last year demonstrated “clearly that discriminating on the basis of race to achieve diversity is not lawful.”
“As Chief Justice Roberts wrote in the majority opinion, ‘[e]liminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it,'” he went on to say. “NCU knows better than to offer educational scholarships that exclude students based on race. Racial discrimination is strictly prohibited under NCU’s nondiscrimination policy. Why isn’t NCU following its own rules?
