Historically Black Colleges and Universities

History of HBCUs

HBCUs were established to educate Blacks who could not gain admission to White colleges. Three HBCUs opened prior to the Civil War and are generally considered the first colleges established for African Americans: Cheyney University (1837) and [Page 252]Lincoln University (1854) in Pennsylvania and Wilberforce University (1856) in Ohio. The remainder were established after 1865 and operated as segregated institutions until segregation was dismantled in higher education by U.S. Supreme Court rulings in Sweatt v. Painter (1950) and McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education (1950), cases that forbade inter- and intrainstitutional racial segregation, respectively. Subsequently, due to Brown v. Board of Education, Topeka (1954) and the civil rights movement, more Black students enrolled in White colleges and universities.

Cheyney University in Pennsylvania, which opened in 1837, was the first Black institution to educate Blacks beyond elementary school and was founded through a bequest from a Quaker philanthropist, Richard Humphreys. It was followed by Lincoln University in 1854 in Pennsylvania and in 1856 by Wilberforce University in Ohio. The other HBCUs were established after 1865 as religious or teaching training institutions that required advanced elementary education and later secondary education at a time when most states offered only three years of public education. Support for these colleges came from African American benevolent societies, especially those of the Baptist and African Methodist Episcopal churches; northern White benevolent and denominational societies; and wealthy corporate philanthropists such as John D. Rockefeller, Sr.

A small number of HBCUs began as private schools and are now public. For example, in 1925 Thurgood Marshall enrolled in Lincoln University in Chester, Pennsylvania, a Black school for male students founded in 1854 by a White Presbyterian minister. Today, Lincoln University is a public college enrolling both males and females.

Among the senior colleges, 16 are land grant colleges under the Morrill Land Grant Acts to help educate farmers, scientists, and teachers; Alcorn State University in Mississippi was the first. Each state was required to provide this education for all races, and the Southern states established one for Whites and one for Blacks in each of these states. These institutions became these states' A&M and A&T colleges.

Early Examples

Butler's (1977) history of three distinctive Black colleges provides an illustrative history of the origin of Black colleges. She cited Talladega, Tuskegee, and Morehouse as the best HBCUs in 1977. While most HBCUs were organized by Whites for the education of Blacks during the days of segregation, one was organized by a Black person, Booker T. Washington; this was something rare in the 1880s and after. The schools under White direction were able to raise funds and maintain staff, faculty, and administration while drawing top academically prepared students. For example, Thurgood Marshall enjoyed such an environment at Lincoln University and at Howard Law School. At Howard Law School, Marshall's mentor was the Black dean Charles Hamilton Houston, who graduated from Amherst College as class valedictorian and later graduated from Harvard Law School. Also on the Howard Law faculty was William Henry Hastie, a Harvard Law graduate and editor of the Harvard Law Review (Davis & Clark, 1994). During this period, the best of Black intellectuals taught at Black colleges, for example, W. E. B. Du Bois, the first Black to earn a doctorate from Harvard University, was never offered a job at or taught in a White university. He and others like him taught at HBCUs.

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