Historically Black Colleges and Universities: A Legacy of Educational Freedom

Although free blacks were permitted to attend white educational institutions in those northern states which had abolished slavery, they still endured racism and discrimination from their white fellow students and faculty. Moreover, many black students fared poorly at white institutions given the differences between primary education in black and white communities.

This lack of educational opportunity for black Americans was the driving force behind the establishment of colleges founded specifically for black students, which later became known as Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). Some were established before the Civil War and have since provided black people with access to educational and community building opportunities denied during antebellum slavery.

The first HBCU dates to 1837 when Quaker philanthropist Richard Humphreys founded the Institute for Colored Youth in Cheyney, Pennsylvania. His wanted to provide enslaved blacks with basic skills like reading, writing, and math so that they could assimilate into the world as free people. This institute eventually became known as Cheyney University of Pennsylvania.

Another early milestone in the historic black college movement was the founding of Lincoln University near Oxford, Pennsylvania. It began as the Ashmun Institute in 1854, and it has the distinction of becoming the first degree granting HBCU.

Both Lincoln and Cheyney were founded by white benefactors, but, in 1856, Wilberforce University, affiliated with the African Methodist Episcopal Church, was the first college to be owned and operated by black Americans. Later it was joined by Shaw University in North Carolina, which became the first HBCU to be established after the Civil War.

One of the most well-​known HBCUs, Howard University, dates back to November 20, 1866, when ten members of the First Congregational Society in Washington, D.C. met for a missionary gathering. After much discussion, the decision was made to launch a seminary to train black preachers. By early 1867, the founders had expanded their focus to include a liberal arts college and named the school in honor of Major General Oliver O. Howard, a Civil War hero, the Freedmen’s Bureau commissioner, and one of Howard’s founders.

Howard University began accepting its first students in May of 1867 and was soon called “the capstone of Negro education” because of its pivotal role in black higher education. Indeed, just two years later it established the first black law school in the nation with Charlotte Ray, a suffragette and NAACP member, as one of its first graduates. She became the first woman admitted to the District of Columbia Bar.

1867 also saw the founding of Augusta Baptist Institute, a college that aimed to educate and prepare newly freed black slaves to teach and become ministers. It was eventually renamed Morehouse College after American Baptist Home Missionary Society leader Henry L. Morehouse. Among the many prominent graduates of Morehouse was Martin Luther King, Jr, who enrolled at Atlanta’s Morehouse College in September of 1944, following the path of his father, Martin Luther King, Sr., and his maternal grandfather, A. D. Williams.

In 1881, Spelman College became the nation’s oldest historically black women’s college. It has provided women with educational access since post–Civil War times. The school began in 1881 when two Bostonian women, Sophia Packard and Harriet Giles, began leading classes for a small group of black American women, mostly ex-​slaves, in a church basement in Atlanta. Two years later, the school transitioned to Fort McPherson, a Union army training center during the Civil War.

In 1884, philanthropic contributions from industrialist John D. Rockefeller allowed the school to grow. It was renamed Spelman Seminary for Rockefeller’s wife’s mother. College degrees were first awarded in 1901 before it became Spelman College in 1924.

Both the Freedmen’s Bureau and the American Missionary Association played a pivotal role in founding scores of other black colleges in the ensuing years. Their efforts were given a boost with the enactment of the second Morrill Act of 1890, which required states given federal land grants to create at least one institution that admitted black students. Even so, schools serving black communities faced many financial hurdles.

After passage of the Morrill Act, the Cookman Institute of Jacksonville-​- originally founded in 1904 as the first institution of higher education of Blacks in the State of Florida-​-​merged in 1923 with the Daytona Normal and Industrial Institute of Daytona Beach. The Daytona Institute was founded in 1904 by noted civil rights leader black education advocate Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune. Together they became Bethune-​Cookman College.

Dr. Bethune went on to become a prominent national and international figure as an advisor to U.S. presidents while playing a founding role with the United Nations. She also helped found the United Negro College Fund, of which Bethune-​Cookman was a charter member.

Pursuant to the provisions of a state senate bill mandating that a state-​supported higher education instruction be located in Houston, the Houston College for Negroes was established on March 3, 1947. The aim was to offer for the first time a study curriculum comparable to that available to white Texans. That same year the legislature appropriated $2 million to acquire the Houston College for Negroes campus and rename it the Texas State University for Negroes. Later it became Texas Southern University.

In 1965, the HBCU system received formal government recognition with the passage of the Higher Education Act. It defined an HBCU as:

Despite ongoing fiscal challenges tied to funding shortfalls and declining enrollment, HBCUs have produced some of the most prominent minority leaders in business, politics, science, and the academy. Notable alumni include former Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall, Black History Month originator Carter G. Woodson, writer Toni Morrison, Alain Locke, the first black Rhodes Scholar and Harlem Renaissance leader (Howard University), acclaimed acting director Spike Lee and Oscar nominated actor Samuel L. Jackson (Morehouse College); television sensation Oprah Winfrey (Tennessee State); lawyer and civil-​rights activist Marian Wright Edelman and writer Alice Walker (Spelman College); Barbara Jordan, the first U.S. congresswoman from the South (Texas Southern University) and the famed Tuskegee Airmen (Tuskegee Institute).

There are still more than 100 HBCUs in existence. They are the continuation of a proud legacy running back through the freedom schools of the civil rights struggle and the Freedmen’s Bureau schools under Reconstruction. The desire for educational freedom is a thread that unites generations of black men and women, those who sacrificed much in the pursuit of the opportunity to learn.