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.”
This followed a lawsuit from a conservative organization, supported by the Trump administration, that accused the scholarship, which targets 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 the University of Alabama’s Norton-Textra Endowed Scholarship for minority students in English of being discriminatory.
U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said the department “will not yield on this commitment” to “ensure universities are not discriminating against their students based on race and race stereotypes.”
Added the former WWE executive, “Students must be assessed according to merit and accomplishment, not prejudged by the color of their skin.”
The Hamilton 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. It started with donations from the Hamilton family and others. UAB chose the recipients every year.
“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,” said Herschell Lanier Hamilton, son of the scholarship’s namesake, according to AL.com. “As it turns out, they have none.”
“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 added. “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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