George Floyd scholarship violates federal civil rights law, lawsuit claims
A university scholarship only offered to Black students is a violation of U.S. federal civil rights law, according to a legal complaint filed with the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights on Monday.
North Central University’s George Floyd scholarship violates Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits educational institutions from racial discrimination, because it is only open to Black students, the legal watchdog group the Equal Protection Project of the Legal Insurrection Foundation argued in the complaint shared with The College Fix.
Through its George Floyd Memorial Scholarship, the private Christian university in Minneapolis, Minnesota, "engages in invidious discrimination on the basis of race, color and national origin," according to the complaint.
To qualify for the scholarship, students must "be a student who is Black or African American, that is, a person having origins in any of the black racial groups of Africa," according to the information page. The scholarship was created on June 4, 2020, "to invest like never before in a new generation of young black Americans, who are poised and ready to take leadership in our nation," North Central University President Scott Hagan said at the time.
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"The George Floyd Scholarship eligibility requirements are openly racially discriminatory," Equal Protection founder William Jacobson told The College Fix via an emailed statement on Monday. "Regardless of the purpose of the racial discrimination, it is wrong and unlawful."
"NCU needs to come up with a remedial plan to compensate students shut out of the George Floyd Scholarship due to discrimination," Jacobson added.
The watchdog group also claims that the university "defies the civil rights protections of Minnesota’s Human Rights Act, which makes it a criminal offense for an educational institution to limit access to any educational program on the basis of race," according to a footnote included in the complaint.
In addition, the Supreme Court's decision reversing affirmative action last summer made it "clear that discriminating on the basis of race to achieve diversity is not lawful," Jacobson told The College Fix.
"As Chief Justice Roberts wrote in the majority opinion, ‘[e]liminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it,'" he added. "NCU knows better than to run educational scholarships that exclude students based on race," Jacobson stated. "NCU’s nondiscrimination policies absolutely forbid racial discrimination. Why isn’t NCU living up to its own rules?"
Fox News Digital has asked North Central University for comment.