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Morehouse College
Morehouse College is a private, 4-year men's historically Black liberal arts college located in the West End neighborhood of Atlanta, Georgia. It is one of only four 4-year men's colleges in the United States, and the only historically Black college that is a men's college. The mission of Morehouse College is “to develop men with disciplined minds who will lead lives of leadership and service.” The school's motto is Et facta est lux, Latin for “And then there was light,” a reference to Genesis 1:3, which harkens back to Morehouse's connection to the Baptist church and spirituality that is a hallmark of the institution.
Martin Luther King Jr. is perhaps the most notable in a long and distinguished list of Morehouse alumni in many fields of endeavor: in academia, former college presidents Mordecai Wyatt Johnson (Howard), James Nabrit Jr. (Howard), and Michael Lomax (Dillard); in the fields of politics and civil rights, former Atlanta mayor Maynard Jackson, former National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) chairman Julian Bond, and New York Congressman Major Owens; in the fields of sports, entertainment, and the arts, actor Samuel L. Jackson, Olympian Edwin Moses, and filmmaker Spike Lee; in the fields of the military and business, U.S. Army Lieutenant General James Hall, former associate publisher of Jet magazine Robert E. Johnson, and Nathaniel Bronner, founder of Bronner Bros. cosmetics; and clergymen such as theologian Howard Thurman, former chairman of the Morehouse College Board of Trustees, the Reverend Otis Moss Jr., pastor of Olivet Institutional Baptist Church in Cleveland, and the Reverend Calvin Butts, pastor of Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York.
This entry discusses Morehouse College's history, its academic programs, alumni, campus facilities and holdings, and student life and athletic programs.
Historical Background
Morehouse College started as the Augusta Institute, founded in 1867 under the auspices of the American Baptist Home Missionary Society, a society dedicated to educating African Americans in the post-bellum South. Three men were involved in the founding and initial operation of the Institute: the Reverend William Jefferson White, a clergyman and furniture maker; the Reverend Edmund Turney, a founder of the National Theological Institute in Washington, D.C., an institution established for the education of freed African Americans; and Augusta native Richard C. Coulter, a former enslaved African and National Theological Institute graduate.
Early Years
The institution first operated out of the Springfield Baptist Church, the oldest African American church in the United States. Twelve years later, in 1879, the Reverend Frank Quarles led a movement to move the institution closer to the center of the state in Atlanta. The institute was relocated to the state capital and renamed the Atlanta Baptist Seminary, where the first seminary classes were hosted by Rev. Quarles in the basement of the Friendship Baptist Church. The seminary was located in several locations in Atlanta until 1885, when the institution finally broke ground on a 14-acre site in Atlanta's West End, where Morehouse stands today. By 1897, the charter of the seminary was amended to grant the institution full college powers, and it was again renamed, as Atlanta Baptist College.
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