The conservative law firm Pacific Legal Foundation weaponized a 19th century law designed to protect Black Americans’ civil rights to force the University of California at San Diego to shutter its scholarship program for Black students by making it available to all students, The Washington Post reported Tuesday.
“It’s an attack on private efforts to use money to pursue what you consider a social justice purpose,” said Cara McClellan, a University of Pennsylvania law professor, speaking with the Post. “And it’s through the lens of saying that because it’s race conscious, it’s illegal.”
Attorneys for Pacific Legal Foundation alleged in a lawsuit that the scholarship program violated the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, which was adopted after the Civil War to prevent members of the White supremacist organization from suppressing the rights of Black Americans, many of whom at the time were newly freed from slavery.
The law firm represented Kai Peters, a junior who transferred to University of California at San Diego who, as a white person, was not eligible for the scholarship program in question.
“We’re simply trying to ensure that promise of equal protection is granted to everyone,” said Jack Brown, an attorney for Pacific Legal Foundation, according to the Post.
The elimination of the Black scholarship program at University of California at San Diego – which McClellan said the law firm was “flipping the purpose of the law on its face” to shutter – represents just the latest example of universities across the country shuttering diversity, equity and inclusion programs under the Trump administration, which has sought to eliminate such practices in educational institutions.
For Julie Park, a professor at the University of Maryland, however, Pacific Legal Foundation’s logic in targeting the program was achieving the exact opposite of what its lawyers proclaimed themselves to be doing.
“It’s their spin, right, that these types of scholarships are somehow fostering discrimination, when in reality, the intent is the exact opposite,” Park said, speaking with the Post.
