By By Sid Salter / syndicated columnist
October 20, 2004
The legal battle over the Ayers higher education litigation is over. The political battle over where the state comes up with the $503 million necessary to satisfy the judgment is just beginning.
The refusal of the U.S. Supreme Court to hear an appeal of the 29-year-old college desegregation lawsuit signals the end of the protracted legal fight, but with the state budget already in crisis from stagnant revenues, sharp increases in Medicaid spending and a multi-year teacher pay increase the struggle for additional Ayers funds is just beginning for the state's historically black universities.
The $503 million Ayers settlement designed to correct more than a century of discriminatory state taxpayer neglect at Jackson State, Mississippi Valley State and Alcorn State universities will stand. In 2002, the state and Ayers plaintiffs agreed to the settlement that would distribute $503 million over 17 years to the three universities. Payments have been on hold pending the final appeal to the Supreme Court.
The late Jake Ayers Sr. of Glen Allen filed the suit in 1975 on behalf of his children and other black college students, claiming the state had discriminated in providing both facilities and programs for JSU, ASU and Valley.
Ayers never lived to see the case adjudicated, but his widow and the rest of the plaintiffs didn't let the case die with him. Now, some 30 years later, more than a century of discrimination in higher education has come home to roost for Mississippi lawmakers.
In the wake of the Ayers decision and the state's current fiscal woes, the Legislature has only a few choices.
With the Medicaid crisis and the other big ticket budget priorities and a lack of revenue that virtually guaranteed a tax increase before Ayers entered the mix on Monday, the state was facing new revenue needs that range depending on which legislator is talking from $125 million to $450 million.
The 2002 settlement provided a $503 million, 17-year structured settlement. The settlement payout has been delayed by the high court appeals.
Now, in the teeth of a budget crisis, lawmakers face paying the Ayers piper.
Lawmakers could react by going through the motions of settling the Ayers case while shorting current funding needs for the three historically black universities.
A second option would be to simply extend some additional bonding for new buildings and other resources to JSU, ASU and Valley while failing to appropriate increased academic program funds.
There's a third and more ominous path available to lawmakers. That path would see the Legislature pay off Ayers while neglecting funding needs to all the state's eight institutions of higher learning.
While that course might provide some civil rights justice for the state's past discrimination, it would hurt the current crop of students of all races at all eight institutions.
The state's Ayers obligations to JSU, ASU and Valley should be met on time and in full for the next 17 years according to the 2002 settlement a settlement that was more than fair to the state of Mississippi.
Doubt it? Go tour Ole Miss, State and Southern. Then tour Alcorn State.
But meeting the Ayers obligation does not relieve the Legislature or the taxpayers of meeting current obligations to all of the state's eight institutions of higher learning.
Ayers was fought to bring equality to higher education funding, not to starve the state's IHL system of funding.
Sid Salter is Perspective editor of The Clarion-Ledger in Jackson. Contact him at (601) 961-7084 or e-mail ssalter@clarionledger.com.