Whites-only Scholarship, If you're a kid from Iowa who plans to attend Columbia University,
but not to study law, and you know for a fact that you will return to
Iowa after you graduate, then you may have a strong chance of winning a
scholarship! Unfortunately, your scholarship is funded by a dead racist
person.Lydia C. Roberts left her estate to Columbia when she died in 1920, the Associated Press reported,
and created a very restrictive fellowship, the Lydia C. Roberts
Graduate Fellowship. It stipulates that money be given only to "a person
of the Caucasian race," among the Iowa-related rules and other rules.
Columbia University wants to keep the money, but get rid of the
Caucasian clause. However, doing so is more complicated than you might
think: Columbia can't change the terms without permission from a judge. the New York Post reported.
The Post said that it's not clear if the school had been following
the "whites only" rule, which the NAACP had protested all the way back
in 1949.
Last week, Lucy Drotning, the university's associate provost, filed
an affidavit in Manhattan Supreme Court to request approval to make the
fellowship less racist. The court request made headlines after local
tabloids found it.
"Circumstances have so changed from the time when the Trust was
established" that complying with the restrictions are "impossible," the
filing says, according to the New York Daily News.