The HBCU Tradition: 185 Years of Building Against the Odds

In 1837, twenty-three years before the Civil War and twenty-six years before the Emancipation Proclamation, a group of Philadelphia Quakers chartered the Institute for Colored Youth in the commonwealth of Pennsylvania. The founding purpose was blunt in the way that Quaker moral logic tends to be blunt: Black people were capable of academic learning, they deserved the opportunity to prove it, and so an institution should exist to make that possible. The school would eventually relocate to Cheyney, Pennsylvania, become Cheyney University, and be recognized as the oldest historically Black college or university in the United States. What its founders could not have fully imagined was that they were inaugurating an institutional tradition—185 years long and counting—that would quietly become one of the most important engines of American democratic life.

The history of HBCUs is, in the most direct sense, a history of American contradiction. These institutions were built because the mainstream of American higher education refused Black students entry—not incidentally, not as an oversight, but as a matter of law and violent social custom. And yet from that exclusion arose something the architects of exclusion did not anticipate: a network of colleges and universities so generative of talent, so rich in intellectual tradition, so capable of producing leaders across every domain of American life, that their influence would ultimately penetrate and reshape the very institutions that had kept their students out.

Before the War: Cheyney, Lincoln, and Wilberforce

The Institute for Colored Youth was not born in a vacuum. By the 1830s, the abolitionist movement had developed a coherent argument—insisted upon especially by Black abolitionists like Frederick Douglass and David Walker—that the denial of education was a primary mechanism of enslavement and white supremacy. To educate a Black person was, in the antebellum South, literally criminal. Literacy laws across the slaveholding states made it a punishable offense to teach an enslaved person to read. The logic was transparent: ignorance was control, and control was the purpose of the whole edifice.

In that context, the founding of an institution dedicated to the higher education of Black youth was not a charitable act so much as a political one. Richard Humphreys, the Quaker silversmith who endowed what became Cheyney, directed that $10,000 of his estate be used to “instruct the descendants of the African Race in school learning, in the various branches of the mechanic arts, trades, and agriculture.” The vision was vocational in the nineteenth-century sense—practical, self-sufficient, dignified labor—but the institution grew into something broader, a place that trained teachers who fanned out to educate communities throughout Pennsylvania and beyond.

Lincoln University, chartered in 1854 in Oxford, Pennsylvania, advanced the antebellum project further. Founded by the Presbyterian Church and named in honor of Abraham Lincoln after the Civil War’s conclusion, Lincoln was the first degree-granting institution in the Western Hemisphere to provide a higher education in the arts and sciences specifically for men of African descent. Its list of alumni would eventually include Thurgood Marshall, who argued Brown v. Board of Education before the Supreme Court, and Langston Hughes, whose poetry became the soundtrack of the Harlem Renaissance. The fact that two of the most consequential Black voices of the twentieth century were trained at the same small Pennsylvania institution is not a coincidence; it is evidence of what concentrated educational investment in a community can produce.

Wilberforce University, founded in Ohio in 1856 through a joint effort of the Methodist Episcopal Church and the African Methodist Episcopal Church, was the first college to be owned and operated by African Americans. Named for William Wilberforce, the British abolitionist, it drew students from free Black families in the North and, clandestinely, freedom-seekers who had escaped the South. When the Civil War began and white Methodist donors withdrew funding, Bishop Daniel Payne of the AME Church purchased the institution outright. That act of institutional reclamation—a Black religious denomination buying a college to save it from closure—set a template for how HBCUs would sustain themselves for the next century: through the organized self-help and sacrifice of Black communities who had no other options and could not afford to let these schools fail.

The Second Morrill Act and the Architecture of Inequality

The first Morrill Land-Grant Act of 1862 had established a system of public universities funded by federal land grants, intended to spread practical higher education in agriculture and the mechanical arts across a democratizing nation. It was a transformative policy—and one from which Black Americans in the South were entirely excluded. The great land-grant universities of the former Confederacy were not only closed to Black students; their very founding was predicated on a racial order that treated Black labor as raw material rather than as minds to be developed.

The Second Morrill Act of 1890 attempted to correct this. It required that states with segregated universities either admit Black students to their existing land-grant colleges or establish separate institutions that would receive a proportional share of federal funding. Seventeen states chose the latter path, establishing what became known as the “1890 institutions”—a group that includes Florida A&M, Alcorn State, Prairie View A&M, Southern University, and others. On paper, these schools were to be funded on equal terms. In practice, they were starved.

The structural funding gap that opened in 1890 never fully closed. Studies conducted across the twentieth century documented a consistent pattern: states routinely diverted federal funds intended for Black land-grant institutions to their white counterparts, allowed facilities at HBCUs to deteriorate while investing in historically white universities, and resisted federal oversight designed to enforce equitable distribution. The consequence was not merely financial; it shaped what these institutions could offer, who they could hire to teach, and how they were perceived by the broader educational establishment that had designed the system to disadvantage them.

Howard, Fisk, Spelman, Morehouse: The Institutions That Made a World

The years immediately following the Civil War saw the most rapid expansion of Black higher education in American history. The Freedmen’s Bureau, northern missionary societies, and the AME and other Black churches moved with urgency to establish schools, knowing that the window of federal goodwill might not last—and knowing, correctly, that it would not. Between 1865 and 1900, dozens of institutions were founded across the South that would eventually coalesce into the network we now call HBCUs.

Howard University, founded in 1867 in Washington, D.C., and named for General Oliver Otis Howard, the Commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau, was distinctive from the start. Where many HBCUs were founded primarily to train teachers and preachers, Howard aimed from the outset at professional education at the highest level. Its law school, opened in 1869, became the training ground for the generation of civil rights attorneys who would dismantle Jim Crow from the inside. Thurgood Marshall studied there. Charles Hamilton Houston taught there and shaped the legal strategy that culminated in Brown v. Board of Education. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund was, in significant part, a Howard Law production. To understand the constitutional transformation of American race law in the mid-twentieth century is to understand Howard’s law school as a strategic institution, not merely an educational one.

Fisk University, founded in Nashville in 1866 by the American Missionary Association, pursued a different kind of distinction. Its commitment to the liberal arts drew scholars of international stature; W.E.B. Du Bois studied there before earning his doctorate from Harvard. The Fisk Jubilee Singers, a student choral ensemble that toured internationally beginning in 1871 to raise money for the struggling university, introduced the world to African American spirituals and became one of the most improbable cultural diplomacy stories in American history. They performed for Queen Victoria. They performed for Kaiser Wilhelm I. They raised enough money to construct Jubilee Hall, now a National Historic Landmark, which still stands on the Fisk campus as a monument to what student musicians built with their voices.

Spelman College and Morehouse College, both founded in Atlanta, developed into sister institutions that together became the heart of Black higher education in the Deep South. Spelman was established in 1881 in the basement of Friendship Baptist Church by Sophia Packard and Harriet Giles, two New England teachers who had traveled to Atlanta after the Civil War and were appalled by the lack of educational opportunities for Black women. The school was initially called the Atlanta Baptist Female Seminary; it was renamed in 1884 in honor of Harvey Buel Spelman and his wife Lucy Henry Spelman, abolitionists whose family supported the school financially—and whose grandson, John D. Rockefeller Jr., would become one of the institution’s major donors. Spelman remains today the leading historically Black college for women in the United States, consistently ranked among the best liberal arts colleges in the nation regardless of designation.

Morehouse College, opened in 1867 as the Augusta Institute in the basement of Springfield Baptist Church in Augusta, Georgia, relocated to Atlanta and became Morehouse in 1913. Its educational philosophy was shaped by Benjamin Elijah Mays, who served as president from 1940 to 1967 and whose insistence on academic excellence and social responsibility produced what became known as “the Morehouse Man”—a vision of educated Black manhood that stood in explicit defiance of the stereotypes that American racism required. Martin Luther King Jr. enrolled at Morehouse at age fifteen, graduated in 1948, and later said of Mays: “He is my spiritual mentor and intellectual father.” The relationship between those two men—between what Morehouse taught and what King did with that teaching—is one of the defining intellectual genealogies of the American twentieth century.

The Alumni Who Remade America

Any accounting of what HBCUs have contributed to American life must eventually confront the sheer density of consequential figures who passed through their classrooms. Thurgood Marshall at Lincoln and Howard Law. Martin Luther King Jr. at Morehouse. Toni Morrison at Howard, where she studied English literature and began the intellectual formation that would lead to Nobel Prize-winning novels that permanently expanded the American literary canon. Oprah Winfrey at Tennessee State. Jesse Jackson at North Carolina A&T. Alice Walker at Spelman. Nikki Giovanni at Fisk. David Satcher at Morehouse, who became the sixteenth Surgeon General of the United States. The list extends across every field of American endeavor: medicine, law, science, literature, music, politics, journalism, activism.

Kamala Harris, who attended Howard University and graduated in 1986 with a degree in political science and economics, became the 49th Vice President of the United States—the first woman, the first Black American, and the first South Asian American to hold that office. She has spoken directly about what Howard gave her, not just in terms of intellectual preparation but in terms of the formation of her sense of what was possible and what she was entitled to demand of the world.

“Howard University was a place that gave me a community of friends and mentors who taught me how to speak truth, fight for justice, and lead with courage. It was a place where I came into my own.” Kamala Harris — Vice President of the United States, Howard University Class of 1986

Martin Luther King Jr., whose entire intellectual development unfolded in HBCU classrooms, articulated the mission of Black higher education with characteristic precision. The purpose of education, he argued, was not merely the acquisition of technical skill but the cultivation of moral courage—the capacity to see clearly and to act rightly in the face of a society organized to make both difficult.

“The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character—that is the goal of true education.” Martin Luther King Jr. — Morehouse College Class of 1948, “The Purpose of Education,” Maroon Tiger, 1947

The Sit-In Movement: NC A&T and the SNCC

On February 1, 1960, four freshmen from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University—Ezell Blair Jr., David Richmond, Franklin McCain, and Joseph McNeil—sat down at the whites-only lunch counter at the Woolworth’s in downtown Greensboro, North Carolina, and requested service. When they were refused, they remained seated. The next day they returned, this time with more students. Within weeks, the Greensboro sit-in had inspired similar demonstrations across the South—in Nashville, in Atlanta, in Rock Hill, South Carolina, in cities and towns where the logic of nonviolent direct action was being tested against the violence of a system that depended on Black passivity for its survival.

The Greensboro Four were HBCU students. They had been taught, in the classrooms and chapels and dormitory bull sessions of NC A&T, that their lives had dignity and their rights had worth. The sit-in movement did not emerge from nowhere; it emerged from institutions that had spent decades telling young Black people that they were capable of demanding more from the world than the world was offering them.

Two months later, in April 1960, Ella Baker convened a conference at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, to coordinate the sit-in movement nationally. Shaw, a historically Black institution founded in 1865, provided the meeting space; Baker, whose own politics were shaped by decades of organizing, provided the vision. The organization that emerged from that Raleigh meeting was the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee—SNCC, pronounced “Snick”—which would go on to organize Freedom Rides, voter registration drives, the Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964, and ultimately the Selma-to-Montgomery marches that produced the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The headquarters of the civil rights movement’s most radical and generative student wing was born on an HBCU campus, midwifed by an HBCU-trained organizer, and staffed overwhelmingly by students from HBCUs across the South.

Chronic Underfunding: The Documented Gap

To understand the HBCU achievement is to understand it against the backdrop of systematic financial deprivation. The United States Commission on Civil Rights documented as early as 1969 that states in the South were routinely failing to provide HBCUs with equitable funding. That report was not the first and would not be the last. The pattern it described—underfunded facilities, inadequate library collections, lower faculty salaries, chronic deferred maintenance—persisted across subsequent decades and subsequent studies.

A landmark 2019 analysis by the Center for American Progress found that states with HBCU land-grant institutions had underfunded those schools by a combined total of more than $12 billion over the preceding three decades relative to their historically white counterparts. In Maryland, for instance, Morgan State University and Bowie State University received dramatically lower per-student state appropriations than the University of Maryland system schools, despite serving student populations with higher proportions of Pell Grant recipients—students who require more institutional support, not less.

The endowment gap is equally stark. Harvard University’s endowment exceeds $50 billion. The combined endowments of all 101 HBCUs do not approach that figure. Howard University, the wealthiest HBCU, has an endowment of approximately $900 million—extraordinary by HBCU standards, but a fraction of the resources available to comparable predominantly white institutions. The consequence is not abstract: it determines what programs can be offered, what facilities can be maintained, what scholarships can be awarded, and what research can be conducted.

“HBCUs have consistently produced outsized outcomes relative to the resources they receive. The question we should be asking is not whether HBCUs are succeeding—they clearly are—but what they could accomplish if they were funded equitably.” Dr. Marybeth Gasman — Samuel DeWitt Proctor Endowed Chair in Education, Rutgers University

United States v. Fordice: The Courts Confront the Legacy

In 1992, the Supreme Court decided United States v. Fordice, a case arising from Mississippi’s racially dual system of higher education that had persisted for decades after Brown v. Board of Education. The plaintiffs argued that Mississippi had never genuinely dismantled the separate-and-unequal structure it had built—that while the formal barriers to Black enrollment at historically white universities had been removed, the state continued to maintain policies that preserved racial separation and perpetuated inequality.

The Supreme Court agreed, ruling eight to one that Mississippi had not met its constitutional obligation to dismantle its segregated system. The Court held that simply adopting race-neutral admissions policies was insufficient if those policies had the effect of preserving a racially identifiable dual system. States were required to take affirmative steps to eliminate vestiges of de jure segregation in their higher education systems—and that obligation included ensuring that historically Black institutions received adequate funding and academic programmatic support.

Fordice was a significant legal victory, but its practical implementation was uneven. Mississippi entered into a decades-long consent decree that included commitments to increase funding for its three HBCUs—Jackson State, Alcorn State, and Mississippi Valley State—and to enhance their academic programs. Progress was slow, contested, and subject to continuous litigation. The case illustrated both the possibilities and the limitations of constitutional litigation as a remedy for structural educational inequality: it could compel states to act but could not guarantee that action would be adequate, sustained, or transformative.

The Current Landscape: 101 Institutions and Their Impact

The Higher Education Act of 1965, which first defined HBCUs in federal law, created the statutory framework that now governs their federal recognition. To qualify, an institution must have been established prior to 1964, with the principal mission of educating Black Americans. Today there are 101 accredited HBCUs in the United States, located across nineteen states, the District of Columbia, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. They range from large public research universities like Florida A&M, with its nationally ranked College of Pharmacy, to small private liberal arts colleges like Dillard University in New Orleans and Talladega College in Alabama, the oldest private historically Black liberal arts college in the state.

Collectively, these 101 institutions enroll approximately 228,000 students. They confer about 15 percent of all bachelor’s degrees earned by Black students in the United States—a remarkable share given that HBCUs represent less than 3 percent of all degree-granting postsecondary institutions. Their economic impact is substantial: a 2020 report by the United Negro College Fund estimated that HBCUs generate more than $14.8 billion in economic output annually, support more than 134,000 jobs, and contribute significantly to the economies of the communities, many of them historically underserved, in which they are located.

HBCUs produce disproportionate shares of America’s Black professionals across high-need fields. They award approximately 25 percent of all bachelor’s degrees in STEM fields earned by Black students. They produce the majority of Black officers in the U.S. military. Roughly 80 percent of Black judges, 50 percent of Black attorneys, and 40 percent of Black engineers received their undergraduate education at an HBCU. Howard University’s College of Medicine alone has trained more than 20 percent of all practicing Black physicians in the United States. These are not the outcomes of institutions that are failing; they are the outcomes of institutions that have been succeeding against extraordinary odds for nearly two centuries.

Why HBCUs Still Matter: Belonging, Leadership, and Outcomes

In the decades since legal segregation ended and predominantly white institutions opened their doors to Black students, a recurring question has shadowed the HBCU sector: are they still necessary? The question is usually framed in terms of efficiency or redundancy. If Black students can now attend any institution, why maintain a separate set of schools defined by their historical relationship to racial exclusion?

The outcomes data offer one answer. Research consistently shows that HBCU graduates, particularly from low-income backgrounds, demonstrate higher rates of degree completion, greater civic engagement, and stronger economic mobility relative to comparable Black students at predominantly white institutions. A 2015 Gallup-USA Funds study found that HBCU graduates reported higher levels of emotional support and a stronger sense that their professors cared about their success than graduates of other institutions. The intangibles matter: what it means to walk into a classroom where the professor looks like you, where the curriculum takes your history seriously, where no one doubts your right to be there, where excellence is expected and belonging is assumed.

The campus climate research is unambiguous on this point. Studies examining the experiences of Black students at predominantly white institutions have documented what scholars call “racial battle fatigue”—the cumulative cognitive and emotional toll of navigating an environment where one’s presence is questioned, one’s intelligence is doubted, and one’s history is invisible in the curriculum. HBCU campuses, by contrast, represent environments designed from the ground up around Black intellectual life. The difference is not merely psychological; it shows up in graduation rates, in graduate school enrollment, and in long-term professional achievement.

The leadership pipeline argument is equally compelling. The concentration of Black alumni who have shaped American civic life—in the judiciary, in medicine, in Congress, in the arts—suggests that HBCUs do something qualitatively distinctive in the development of leaders. They produce people who understand, from their education and from the institutional memory of the schools themselves, that excellence is a form of resistance, that scholarship is a form of service, and that professional achievement carries an obligation to the communities from which one came. That is not an ideology that appears in a mission statement; it is transmitted through culture, through mentorship, through the accumulated weight of institutional history that every incoming student inherits the moment they arrive on campus.

The HBCU story, at its core, is a story about what a community can build when it is denied access to what already exists. It is a story about the relationship between institutional investment and human potential, about the compounding returns of educating generation after generation in an environment that takes their humanity as its premise rather than its aspiration. From the basement of Friendship Baptist Church in Atlanta to the National Mall in Washington, where Howard University stands a mile from the Capitol, these institutions have bent the arc of American history in the direction of justice. The 185 years since Cheyney’s founding are not a completed story. They are the foundation on which the next chapter is being built.