Tompkins_v._Alabama_State_University
Tompkins v. Alabama State University
Legal case involving affirmative action
Tompkins v. Alabama State University, 15 F. Supp. 2d 1160 (N.D. Ala. 1998), was a legal case involving affirmative action, that was decided in a United States Federal Court.
This article needs to be updated. (February 2013) |
This was the first case filed by an African American student to challenge the existing race-based affirmative action admission policy at Alabama State University (ASU) in Montgomery, Alabama. In Tompkins, four black applicants who had been rejected for the Alabama State University white-only scholarship program filed suit to challenge the institution's admissions policy on equal protection grounds, and their case prevailed. To Tompkins, the issue was a simple one: "They said I have to be white and I can't be." "It's strange," says Tompkins. "You have a historically black institution giving scholarships to whites to remedy discrimination."[1]