The Lawsuit Against the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation Scholarship Explained
No one has been selected, nor has anyone been rejected, so why is a conservative group suing?
By Alphonso David
Imagine suing a restaurant for refusing to serve you when the restaurant had yet to open, you never made a reservation, never walked through the door, no one had been seated, and the sign outside said everyone was welcome.
That is, in plain terms, the lawsuit now being brought against the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s (CBCF) Spouses Education Scholarship.
The CBCF is defending a meritless lawsuit brought by the American Alliance for Equal Rights challenging CBCF’s 2026 Spouses Education Scholarship under Section 1981 of the Civil Rights Act of 1866. The 2026 scholarship is open to qualified applicants of all races, no scholarship recipients had been selected when CBCF moved to dismiss the case, and two of the three students cited by the plaintiffs did not submit completed applications.
I am proud to serve as co-counsel defending CBCF. We took on this case because the facts and the law support the foundation. We also took it on because the case is part of a larger campaign that is pushing schools, nonprofits, and other institutions to pull back from scholarships and programs that expand opportunity.
Across the country, organizations are changing or ending scholarships, fellowships, and leadership programs because they fear lawsuits, investigations, and political attacks. In many cases, this happens before any court has ruled that the program is unlawful.
Institutions change programs because litigation is costly, because boards are nervous, or because leaders believe years of legal conflict will take money and attention from the people they serve. That is how the lawsuit itself becomes the punishment. The groups bringing these cases do not need to win every time. They only need to make opportunity too expensive to defend.
The case against CBCF shows the problem clearly because the injury claimed by the plaintiffs has not happened. Race is not an eligibility requirement for the 2026 scholarship. Applicants did not have to identify their race, and they could choose “Not Applicable” when asked about race or ethnicity. CBCF has also said clearly that qualified students of all races and backgrounds may apply, and that race will not be used to choose recipients.
No 2026 scholarship recipient had been selected when CBCF asked the court to dismiss the lawsuit. Only one of the three anonymous students named by the plaintiffs submitted a completed application. Another started an application but did not finish it. The third did not apply at all and instead said they might be interested in a future scholarship cycle whose rules had not even been announced.
The plaintiffs are therefore asking a federal court to fix decisions CBCF never made. They have, in effect, written their own rejection letters, put CBCF’s name at the bottom, and offered those letters as proof that the foundation harmed them.
That is not how federal courts are supposed to work.
Legal rules called standing and ripeness are not tricks or technicalities. They protect the proper role of the courts. A person must show a real injury, caused by the defendant, that has happened or is about to happen, and that a court can fix. Courts decide real disputes. They do not issue opinions about what an organization might do someday.
If someone can choose not to apply, assume they would be rejected, blame the organization for that imagined rejection, and then sue, almost any nonprofit program could be taken to court before it makes a single decision. The injury would not have to be real. The hypothetical injury would only have to be repeated often enough to sound real.
The stakes are also bigger than this one legal rule.
For decades, CBCF has developed leaders, informed public policy, educated the public, and supported students. Its commitment to the Black community is not hidden. It is the reason the organization exists. But a mission centered on Black progress does not mean the CBCF program excludes people who are not Black. The 2026 scholarship is open to qualified applicants of all races.
We should be careful about any legal theory that treats an organization’s history and mission as proof of discrimination when the actual rules of the program are race neutral. Equal opportunity does not require Black institutions to forget the problems they were created to address, the communities that built them, or the history that shaped their work.
The law should protect people with legitimate claims. It should not reward anyone for inventing an injury or allow courts to punish an organization for a decision it never made.
The court should dismiss this lawsuit. And the rest of us should make clear that educational opportunity, charitable freedom, and Black institutional leadership are worth defending.
Alphonso David is a civil rights attorney and the president and CEO of the Global Black Economic Forum.
"...why is a conservative group suing?"
Because they're butthurt.
I've been white my entire life, and "Unfair to white people!" has never been a thing. Never.