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A scholarship once reserved for Black students at a California university is now available to all after a white student and a conservative nonprofit claimed it violated a federal anti-Ku Klux Klan law. The case's use of the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, signed into law to protect the rights of African Americans in the South, is a novel approach that attorneys for the plaintiffs touted as a victory for equality and a possible blueprint for future challenges. The law is "supposed to protect everyone, regardless of race," said Jack Brown, an attorney with the Pacific Legal Foundation, which represented the Californians for Equal Rights Foundation and Kai Peters, a student at the University of California at San Diego. The Pacific Legal Foundation filed a lawsuit in July against UC San Diego and the San Diego Foundation, which administers the scholarship meant to bolster the slim Black student population on the campus. Black students make up about 3% of UC San Diego's undergraduate student population. Most of the university's students are from California, where Black people make up just above 5% of the population. The groups settled in mid-October before a judge considered the case, and the San Diego Foundation said it would rename its decades-old Black Alumni Scholarship Fund after its founder and an alumnus. The scholarship, worth up to $2,500 a year, or $10,000 total, will now be available to all students. The foundation declined to comment on the settlement. UC San Diego did not respond to a request for comment. The San Diego case marks the first time the Pacific Legal Foundation has cited the Ku Klux Klan Act to dismantle university initiatives aimed at supporting minority groups. The Reconstruction-era civil-rights law was designed to stop conspiracies between government officials and private entities to deny Americans equal protection under the law, compelled by the white supremacist group's threats to African Americans in the South at the time. The Pacific Legal Foundation argued in its lawsuit that the university and the San Diego Foundation's collaboration to provide scholarships to only Black students amounted to a conspiracy that hindered all students' right to equal protection. It's unclear whether the statute's use in the lawsuit would have held up in court. Cara McClellan, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Carey Law School, said the San Diego case was "flipping the purpose of the law on its face." If it were taken to court, a similar case could also have wide-ranging implications for private philanthropy outside higher education, she said. "It's an attack on private efforts to use money to pursue what you consider a social justice purpose," McClellan said. "And it's through the lens of saying that because it's race conscious, it's illegal." The lawsuit also contended that the scholarship violated the 1964 Civil Rights Act and evaded California's constitutional ban on racial preferences. In its investigations of higher-education institutions and programs across the country, the Trump administration has repeatedly cited the Civil Rights Act, including Title VI, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race. Peters, the student plaintiff, was a junior transfer student at UC San Diego who was "eager to find scholarship opportunities to help offset his educational costs," the Pacific Legal Foundation said in a statement on the lawsuit. "But Kai discovered he was automatically excluded from one of the university's scholarship programs -- not because of his grades, financial need, or career potential, but solely because of his race." The Black Alumni Scholarship Fund was founded in 1983 at UC San Diego by alumnus Lennon Goins. The revamped scholarship is now named after Goins. The fund was moved into an endowment at the San Diego Foundation in 1998 after California passed Proposition 209 that eliminated state and local affirmative action programs, according to an archived webpage describing the scholarship. Recipients were selected from Black students already admitted to UC San Diego "on the basis of their prior community service, campus engagement intentions and resiliency to racial and other identity challenges."
