Today, there are 107 schools designated as historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) in the United States. Many of these institutions were founded during a period of intense racial and political conflict in America. The first Black college, the Institute for Colored Youth (ICY), was founded in Philadelphia in 1837 during the Jacksonian era. At the same time, slavery continued to grow in the South. The US forced many Indigenous nations off their land to make room for that aggressive expansion.

Before the Civil War, tension over slavery intensified. Early Black colleges served a major role in defending the humanity of African Americans during this period. At this time across much of the South, it was illegal to teach enslaved African Americans to read. There was considerable resistance to the idea of educating them in the North as well. Still, two additional colleges joined the ICY during this period. Lincoln University (1854) was founded approximately fifty miles outside of Philadelphia. Wilberforce University (1856) was established in southwestern Ohio. These three schools played a critical role in training their students to lobby Congress on behalf of enslaved Black people. The schools equipped their students with the intellectual skills to argue for the passage of the Reconstruction Amendments that ultimately abolished slavery, guaranteed birthright citizenship regardless of previous conditions of servitude, and provided African American men the right to vote.

African Americans post-emancipation saw education as a major tool toward the upward mobility that would secure their social, political, and economic rights. During the Reconstruction era, new HBCUs were founded all across the Deep South. Many began with the support of various church denominations and religious organizations such as the American Missionary Association. This included Fisk University (1866), founded by members of the American Missionary Association in Nashville, Tennessee. HBCUs received a second boost in growth with the Second Morrill Act, passed by the federal government in 1890. This legislation required states to provide college education opportunities for African Americans. This was accomplished through either admission to existing public institutions or at separate institutions, including HBCUs. These schools trained youth in engineering and agriculture. While federal support and private philanthropy were critical to the founding of HBCUs, it was the fervor for education among African Americans that fueled the rapid expansion of Black colleges.

Debates emerged about the kind of education HBCUs should offer. Some schools focused on vocational education, as opposed to the liberal arts traditions that were being taught at other HBCUs. Both fields of study offered viability and usefulness to African Americans by the late nineteenth century, an age of Jim Crow laws and rampant racial violence.

Booker T. Washington, the nation’s most famous African American leader in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, favored agrarian and domestic pragmatism as a viable solution for the problems confronting Black America. Washington was an 1876 graduate of Hampton Institute, an HBCU located in Virginia. Hampton served as the primary source of this philosophy that championed vocational training for Black students. Washington brought the Hampton Model with him to Tuskegee, Alabama, and founded Tuskegee University in 1881. In contrast, W. E. B. Du Bois strongly favored a broad liberal arts education. This course of study would prepare Black students to forcefully articulate the freedom dreams of African Americans. The common denominator for both philosophies was the political backdrop of the era. The aggressive rise of Jim Crow laws in both the North and the South and the blatant disregard for Black life led to systemic discrimination and rampant racial violence.

In this political atmosphere, HBCUs served as “shelters in a time of storm.” They helped Black students become advocates and activists. These young people would radically transform the social and political contours of the nation. HBCUs provided one of the few spaces where Black youth could gain the confidence to counter the dominant messages of Black inferiority. The schools served as the main training ground for Black teachers, who went into service in segregated classrooms across the Deep South. These institutions also trained their students to strongly believe in the principles of American democracy, even in a system that violently robbed African Americans of these rights on a daily basis. This unwritten “second curriculum” was the dominant and pervasive ethos that defined the Black college experience for generations. These lessons played a critical role in launching the powerful civil rights movement of the twentieth century.