Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) have been spaces of safety and joy from their beginning. Most HBCUs emerged after America’s Civil war (1861-1865) and provided higher education and trade training to African-Americans. Today, many notable African-Americans are graduates of an HBCU, including the first African American to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, Thurgood Marshall, civil rights activist Dr. Martin Luther King, queen of media Oprah Winfrey, and Vice-President Kamala Harris.
Prior to the Civil War, anti-literacy laws obstructed African-Americans and other people of color residing in southern states from pursuing or obtaining even basic education. These prohibitions were imposed on both freedmen and those who were enslaved. Starting in the mid-1700s all southern states had formal and informal laws with severe penalties that impeded white Americans from teaching slaves to read or write. Breaking these laws carried a financial fine of $500 or more, whippings, or prison time. It was widely feared at the time that literate enslaved people were a danger and would lead uprisings. The slave system had taken great effort in separating people from Africa who spoke the same language or were from the same tribe in an effort to curb the planning and carrying out of insurrections. Enslavers feared that literacy would dismantle those efforts.
Achieving literacy in America’s South was very difficult for African-Americans in the 1800’s and was only achieved in secrecy. However, even though the northern states did not have laws specifically restricting African-Americans from education, most northern states, counties, and cities did not offer educational opportunities to African-Americans, and often barred them from attending any educational facility. There were a few exceptions, mostly from Quakers and small philanthropist groups, but most attempts to open schools for African-Americans in the North were met with heavy opposition or even mobs.
Still, even in the face of the legalized segregation in the South and quota limits in the North, coupled with heavy cultural and physical resistance, HBCUs emerged with the help of philanthropists, free African-Americans, and religious organizations like the Quakers, African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church and the American Missionary Association (AMA). The PDI, Predominantly Black Institutions, served educational needs from primary to post-secondary.
As African-American teens and adults sought to prepare themselves for a better life after the abolition of slavery, the importance of HBCUs serving as a refuge from the cultural and public institutions and laws grew. It was common for teens as young as 14 to travel by foot to attend an HBCU in the first half of the 1900’s with the help of family, friends, and well-wishers along the way.
Cheyney University of Pennsylvania was the first Historically Black College and University (HBCU) established. Initially called The African Institute, it was opened on February 23, 1837 in Pennsylvania. This institute was established with an endowment from a Quaker philanthropist, Richard Humphreys, who donated one tenth of his estate to establish this school to educate and prepare African-Americans as teachers, tradesmen, and agriculturalists, which were the skills needed at the time. Sixty-five years later, in 1902, the school was moved to George Cheyney’s farm, which was a 275-acre property about 25 miles from Philadelphia. The name “Cheyney” stuck with the Institution, even though the schools’ name was officially changed several times.
The second HBCU was established 13 years later in Washington, District of Columbia as the Normal School for Colored Girls. This school was established by Myrtilla Miller, an abolitionist who felt that training free African-American women would be beneficial to all African-Americans because these trained teachers would then be able to effectively teach their own people. Naturally, her intentions were vilified. Undeterred, she opened with six students in a small house owned by an African-American man in Washington, DC on what is now 11th and Washington Avenue. Slavery was legal in DC in 1851, but she was able to circumvent the law prohibiting the teaching of African-Americans because of the Compromise of 1850, which banned slave trade in Washington, DC. precincts. Today this college has moved from being a teachers college, and is now known as the University of District Columbia.
The third HBCU, Lincoln University, opened just three years later in 1854 in Pennsylvania as the first degree-granting HBCU after receiving its charter from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. It was originally known as The Ashmun Institute in honor of Jehudi Ashmun, an abolitionist and social reformer from New England, who helped establish the American Colonization Society, which founded Liberia in West Africa as a place to resettle free people of color from America.
The fourth HBCU came just two years later in 1856 in Ohio. Wilberforce University was the first African-American owned and operated HBCU. Its founder, Bishop Daniel A. Payne, was instrumental in establishing the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME), which was the first independent Protestant denomination founded by African Americans. Shaw University, founded in Raleigh, North Carolina, became the first post-Civil War HBCU to be established.
The majority of HBCUs were opened after the Civil War, with the vast majority in 1867, just two years after the Emancipation Proclamation. Today there are 107 HBCUs with about 89% of them located in the South, and in the northern states of Pennsylvania, Delaware, Ohio, Illinois, Maryland, and New York. Before higher education was desegregated, almost all Black students enrolled at HBCUs. Even with integration, HBCUs still confer about one-quarter of African-Americans undergraduate degrees. The Department of Education reports that HBCU attendance has risen after having fallen for a number of years, and that HBCUs are racially diverse, with a 1 to 4 ratio of non-Black students that attend them, including international students. The Department of Education also reports that historically, 75% of all African-American doctors, 75% of African-American military officers, and 80% of African-American federal judges received their undergraduate degrees from an HBCU.
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