Scholarship For Black Med Students Scrapped From University of Alabama at Birmingham As Trump Administration Cries Discrimination
The Herschell Lee Hamilton, M.D., Endowed Scholarship in Medicine, designed for Black medical students at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB), was canceled after the Trump administration opened an investigation accusing it of being a “race-based scholarship” in February 2025, 1819 News reports.
On April 11, donors were alerted by the Office of Advancement and Strategic Initiatives that “UAB has made the decision to discontinue awarding the scholarship(s) and to return the scholarship funds to you” following a lawsuit for a conservative organization, supported by the Trump Administration, accused the scholarship, targeting African-American students of being discriminatory.
The school received a letter from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) stating UAB and five other colleges were being investigated for “alleged impermissible race-based scholarships and race-based segregation.” The litigation was filed with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights in late April 2025 by the Equal Protection Project. This national organization opposes affirmative action efforts based on race. The same group, according to WDHN, also accused UAB’s Norton-Textra Endowed Scholarship for minority students in English of being discriminatory.
Supported by U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, the secretary pushed that the department “will not yield on this commitment” to “ensure universities are not discriminating against their students based on race and race stereotypes.” “Students must be assessed according to merit and accomplishment, not prejudged by the color of their skin,” the former WWE executive said.
The Endowed Scholarship was established in 2013 to provide tuition support for Black students attending medical school who maintained a 3.0 GPA and demonstrated a financial need. Started with donations from the Hamilton family and others, UAB chose the recipients year after year; however, Herschell Lanier Hamilton, son of the scholarship’s namesake, says it’s clear that things have changed. “So for years, I’ve viewed UAB as a leader, a leading institution in the state that had some level of integrity and moral standing,” Hamilton said.
“As it turns out, they have none.”
Dissecting the meaning behind the school claiming the cancellation occurred when it “determined that the criteria for the scholarship could not be amended to comply” with the law and the scholarship’s intent, Hamilton says it’s just another way of pushing “misguided racial nonsense. “They’re just another parrot parroting the same misguided racial nonsense and tropes and policies at the expense of deserving Black medical students, in this instance,” he said.
“It literally is ridiculous and it’s unconscionable that you require an institution to divorce itself from a student scholarship that honors the work of somebody like my father, who wasn’t a controversial figure.”
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