Historically Black Colleges and Universities

Although a few free Blacks attended primarily white colleges in the North in the years before the war, such opportunities were rare and did not exist in the slave states of the Antebellum South. To answer the lack of opportunity, a few institutions of secondary and higher education for Blacks were structured in the antebellum years.

The first HBCUs were founded in Pennsylvania and Ohio. The Institute for Colored Youth (briefly the African Institute at its founding) opened on a farm outside Philadelphia in 1837. It is today Cheyney University of Pennsylvania, which is part of the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education. The Ashmun Institute, also located near Philadelphia, provided theological training as well as basic education from its founding in 1854. It became Lincoln University in 1866 in honour of U.S. Pres. Abraham Lincoln and was private until 1972. The oldest private HBCU in the U.S. was founded in 1856, when the Methodist Episcopal Church opened Wilberforce University in Tawawa Springs (present-day Wilberforce), Ohio, as a coeducational institution for blacks who had escaped slavery in the South through the Underground Railroad. It closed in 1862 but reincorporated in 1863 under the auspices of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME), a historically African American Methodist denomination (Stefon, 2019).

References

Stefon, M. (2019, October 1). Historically black colleges and universities. Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/topic/historically-black-colleges-and-universities

In the antebellum period, every southern state but Tennessee prohibited the formal instruction of blacks, whether free or enslaved. This prohibition of education caused the creation of black schools in southern churches prior to the Civil War. Because blacks were not permitted to be formally educated in the south, and because blacks were not admitted into white schools once they were permitted education, black schools provided a critical service to black American citizens from the antebellum period in the north and the south through modern times. Two of the first black colleges were established prior to the Civil War in the north by Christian missionaries who recognized the lack of educational opportunity for blacks (Fleming, 1984; Roebuck & Murty, 1993). Only 28 black individuals received baccalaureate degrees on U.S. soil prior to the Civil War.

First black U.S. congressman elected from his native state of Virginia, and he soon took his seat in the 51st Congress. The first president of Virginia Normal and Collegiate Institute (later Virginia State University). Although he is best known for that accomplishment and for his post as U.S. Minister Resident and Consul-General to Haiti, he had important experiences in civil rights early on. While living in Cincinnati in the summer of 1841, he experienced the mounting racial tensions that erupted in a white mob's attack on homes and businesses in the areas where he lived (Credo Reference).