This Is What Edward Blum Really Wants
Edward Blum is back. And this time he is coming for your child’s scholarship money.
On April 2, 2026, Blum’s organization, the American Alliance for Equal Rights, filed a federal lawsuit against the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, targeting its CBC Spouses Education Scholarship, a program that has awarded over $11 million to Black students since 1988. The lawsuit argues that giving scholarships to Black students constitutes racial discrimination against non-Black applicants, in violation of a federal civil rights law passed in 1866, a law written specifically to protect newly freed Black Americans from discrimination. Let that irony settle for a moment. Edward Blum is using a law written to protect Black people as a weapon to take money away from Black students.
If you do not know who Edward Blum is, you need to. Because his decisions have already shaped your child’s future in ways most Black families have not fully reckoned with, and he is not close to finished.
Who Is Edward Blum and What Has He Already Taken?
Blum is not a lawyer. But he has a long history of crafting legal attacks on civil rights, including Shelby v. Holder, the case that gutted critical protections in the Voting Rights Act with drastic effects for voters of color. After those voting rights victories, he turned his sights on higher education. He built a front organization called Students for Fair Admissions, openly strategizing that he “needed Asian plaintiffs” to challenge race-conscious admissions, recruiting members and filing lawsuits against Harvard and the University of North Carolina. In June 2023, the Supreme Court ruled in his favor, effectively ending affirmative action in college admissions nationwide.
The damage to Black students was immediate and severe. The nation’s 85 highly selective universities reported an 18 percent drop in Black students, falling from nearly 10,000 to roughly 8,200 in a single year. Seventeen of those colleges reported at least a 40 percent decline in Black enrollment. The number of Black women entering private, highly selective institutions plunged 27 percent. At Princeton, Black enrollment dropped from 9 percent to 5 percent in a single year. The last time Black students represented such a small share of Princeton’s entering class was 1968. Before the assassination of Dr. King. Before the civil rights legislation of the 1960s had time to produce meaningful change.
But Blum did not stop with universities. He founded a new organization, the American Alliance for Equal Rights, and filed a lawsuit against the Fearless Fund, a venture capital firm that provided $20,000 grants to Black women business owners. In September 2024, the Fearless Fund agreed to settle and shut down its Strivers Grant program entirely. A program created to address the near-total exclusion of Black women from venture capital, destroyed by a lawsuit brought by anonymous plaintiffs a judge compared to soccer players faking injuries to draw a foul. He then sued the American Bar Association over its Legal Opportunity Scholarship for minority law students. He sued law firms over diversity fellowships until they changed their eligibility requirements. He is now suing the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation.
Since the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling, Blum’s vision has become a domineering force driving federal education policy, with the Trump administration adopting his framework wholesale. The Education Department, now gutted of the civil rights staff that once protected Black students, is enforcing his ideology. This is not a coincidence. This is a coordinated strategy.
The Scale of What Is Being Erased
Here is the number that should stop every Black parent cold. The number of scholarships with race, ethnicity, or gender criteria in the National Scholarship Providers Association database dropped by 25 percent between March 2023 and June 2025. One quarter of targeted scholarships, gone in two years. Not because courts ruled against all of them. Because organizations decided it was not worth the legal risk of becoming Blum’s next target. He wins even when he never files a single paper.
This matters enormously for Black students because the racial wealth gap makes scholarship access a matter of whether college happens at all, not just where. High-achieving Black students with SAT scores above 1300 were up to 10 percentage points less likely to enroll at highly selective colleges in fall 2024, cascading instead into less selective institutions that generally have lower graduation rates and lower earning outcomes. The students being displaced are not underprepared. They are being systematically redirected away from the institutions that produce the next generation of doctors, lawyers, senators, and CEOs.
Experts see a reversal of gains in a decades-long battle to increase the number of Black students at elite institutions. As one education professor from UCLA observed, “It only takes about five to 10 years of an institution backsliding and changing its philosophy to really affect the next generation of who those leaders are.”
Let’s Be Clear About What This Lawsuit Actually Argues
Blum’s lawsuit against the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation claims that awarding scholarships to Black students discriminates against non-Black applicants. He frames this in the language of colorblindness, neutrality, and equal protection. It sounds principled in the abstract. It is dishonest in context.
The CBCF was founded more than 50 years ago with a mission that was both necessary and specific: to open doors that had been legally and systemically closed to Black Americans for centuries. Slavery was not colorblind. Jim Crow was not colorblind. The redlining that stripped Black families of generational wealth was not colorblind. The school funding formulas that starved Black schools of resources were not colorblind. The admissions policies that explicitly excluded Black students from elite universities for most of this country’s history were not colorblind. Responding to that documented, intentional, race-specific harm with targeted, race-specific investment is not discrimination. It is repair.
The question Blum refuses to answer is simple: if the harm was race-specific, how is the remedy supposed to be race-neutral? His answer, in practice, is that there should be no remedy at all. That is not fairness. That is the perpetuation of inequality dressed in the language of equality.
What the NBPA Demands You Do Right Now
This is not a moment for monitoring. This is a moment for action.
First, support the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation directly and publicly. Visit cbcfinc.org, donate what you can, and make noise on every platform available to you. Organizations that are under legal attack need to know their community is standing with them, not watching from a distance.
Second, apply for every scholarship still available to Black students right now, before more are pressured into closing. The CBC Spouses Education Scholarship awards between $2,500 and $20,000 annually to approximately 300 students from majority-Black congressional districts. Help every eligible young person in your life apply. These scholarships exist because someone fought for them. Honor that fight by using them.
Third, contact your congressional representatives and demand that they publicly defend the CBCF and the scholarship programs under attack. Members of the Congressional Black Caucus created this foundation. They need to hear from their constituents that the community expects them to fight for it.
Fourth, get informed about the full scope of what Blum and his allied organizations are doing. He is simultaneously targeting college admissions, corporate diversity programs, minority business grants, diversity scholarships at law firms, and now the most direct financial lifeline Black students have to college access. This is not a series of isolated lawsuits. It is a legal war on every mechanism Black America has built to counteract exclusion.
Fifth, invest in the academic and leadership development of your children starting now, before high school, before the scholarship season, before the crisis arrives. The pipeline to Black excellence must be built inside our homes, our churches, and our community organizations, because the institutions that once supported it are being dismantled one lawsuit at a time.
The Bottom Line
The CBC Spouses Education Scholarship has put over $11 million into the hands of Black students from underfunded schools in majority-Black communities since 1988. It was created because Black students were navigating inequitable education systems while federal investments in education were shrinking. That problem has not been solved. It has gotten dramatically worse. And the man suing to shut down this scholarship is the same man who has already returned Black enrollment at Princeton to 1968 levels, shut down a grant program for Black women entrepreneurs, and helped build the ideological framework that is currently gutting federal civil rights enforcement.
We are watching in real time as the gains of the civil rights movement are dismantled, and Edward Blum’s fingerprints are on nearly all of it. The National Black Parents Association will not stay silent, and neither should you.
Our children’s futures are not abstract legal principles. They are real lives, real dreams, and real futures that someone is actively working to foreclose. Stand up. Speak out. Fight back.
