The Second Morrill Act, and the Institutions It Created

How the 1890 Act Worked

The first Morrill Act of 1862 granted federal land to states on the condition that proceeds fund colleges teaching agriculture and the mechanic arts. It said nothing explicit about race. Southern states largely used the grants to establish or expand institutions that excluded Black students entirely, and the federal government had no enforcement mechanism that it chose to use.

The Second Morrill Act ↗, signed by President Benjamin Harrison on August 30, 1890, attached a new condition to ongoing federal funding rather than a one-time land grant. States would receive annual cash appropriations — beginning at fifteen thousand dollars and rising — but only if they either admitted Black students to the existing land-grant college or established a separate institution of equivalent standing for them. A state that did neither would lose the money. The Act did not prohibit segregation; it monetized the choice of maintaining it, and every former Confederate state chose the separate-institution path.

The result was the creation of what are now called the 1890 land-grant institutions, a distinct cohort of historically Black colleges and universities embedded in the land-grant framework. Congress's own legislative record for the Act is held at the Library of Congress.

The Institutions That Emerged

Nineteen institutions were established or formally designated under the 1890 settlement, concentrated in the South and border states. They include Tuskegee University in Alabama, Florida A&M University, Prairie View A&M University in Texas, Alcorn State University in Mississippi — which had existed since 1871 and became one of the earliest designated — and institutions in Georgia, Virginia, Maryland, Kentucky, and across the former Confederacy. Delaware State University represents the extension of the pattern into border states.

These colleges received annual federal appropriations, but the "equivalent standing" requirement was never vigorously enforced. For decades the 1890 institutions received substantially less federal agricultural research and extension funding than the 1862 institutions in the same states. The funding disparity was partly addressed by the National Agricultural Research, Extension, and Teaching Policy Act of 1977, which formally recognized the 1890 institutions as full participants in the federal agricultural research system, and further corrective legislation followed in the 1990 and 2008 farm bills.

Today the 1890 land-grant institutions are administered alongside 1862 institutions within the U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Institute of Food and Agriculture, which distributes formula funding across both cohorts. The 1890 cohort also includes Tuskegee University, which holds a special designation as an 1890 institution despite its private status.

What the Structure Preserved

The 1890 Act is frequently described as a compromise, but its mechanism was a federally underwritten choice architecture that made segregation financially rational. States were not compelled to integrate; they were offered an exit ramp that the federal money made easy to take. The institutions that resulted from that exit ramp went on to produce a significant fraction of Black graduates in agriculture, engineering, and the sciences during the century when most research universities were functionally closed to Black students.

The dual land-grant system — 1862 institutions alongside 1890 institutions, often in the same state, sometimes sharing an extension service, sometimes not — is the structural inheritance of that 1890 bargain. Understanding why Alcorn State and Mississippi State both carry land-grant status, and why their resource histories diverged so sharply, requires going back to the Act that made both possible on explicitly unequal terms.

The 1890 cohort also includes Tuskegee University, which holds a special designation as an 1890 institution despite its private status.