Between 1837 and 1915, Black Americans founded more than 100 institutions of higher education across the United States. They did this without federal support, without state funding, without access to the endowments that built white universities, and under legal systems that had recently made it a crime to teach Black people to read. They built these institutions in the aftermath of slavery, during Reconstruction’s brief window, and then during the full force of Jim Crow — when segregation laws made Black access to white universities illegal across the South and severely limited everywhere else. The Historically Black Colleges and Universities they created became the most significant act of collective institution-building in African American history.
The first HBCUs predated the Civil War. Cheyney University in Pennsylvania was founded in 1837, Lincoln University in 1854, Wilberforce University in 1856 — all in the North, where free Black communities had the legal space to organize. But the great wave of HBCU founding came during and immediately after Reconstruction. Between 1865 and 1900, over 80 HBCUs were established across the former Confederate states. The Freedmen’s Bureau provided some early support, but the initiative came from Black communities themselves — from churches, from mutual aid societies, from individual donors who gave what little they had. Many of the early buildings were churches. Many of the early faculty were unpaid. The students came anyway.
The institutions they built were not remedial or provisional. Howard University, founded in 1867, produced lawyers and doctors and civil rights leaders for a century. Spelman College, founded in 1881, became one of the finest liberal arts institutions in the country. Morehouse College produced Martin Luther King Jr. Tuskegee Institute, founded by Booker T. Washington in 1881, developed the agricultural research that transformed Southern farming and trained the Tuskegee Airmen who would prove Black valor in World War II. Fisk University in Nashville produced W.E.B. Du Bois and a generation of Black intellectuals who would define American thought. These were not schools that existed to fill a gap. They were schools that existed to produce excellence under conditions designed to prevent it.
Fayetteville State University — founded in 1867 by seven Black men in Cumberland County — is one of these institutions. It was established the same year as Howard University, the same year Archibald Beebe was murdered at the Market House two miles away. It survived Reconstruction’s end, the Wilmington Massacre, a century of systematic underfunding, and the post-Civil Rights era’s complicated relationship with HBCU support. Today it is the largest HBCU in North Carolina and one of 107 HBCUs still operating in the United States. Each of those 107 institutions is a monument to what Black Americans chose to build when the alternative was to accept that their children would not be educated.
The significance of HBCUs extends beyond their academic record. They were the primary pathway to the Black middle class for most of the 20th century. They trained 80 percent of Black judges, 50 percent of Black lawyers, 50 percent of Black doctors, and 40 percent of Black engineers who practiced during the Jim Crow era — professionals who could not have received those degrees at white institutions. They were the infrastructure of Black civic life — producing the teachers, preachers, doctors, lawyers, and organizers who built and sustained Black communities across America. When the Supreme Court ordered school desegregation in 1954, it was HBCU-trained lawyers — Thurgood Marshall chief among them — who argued the case. The institutions that white America tried to make unnecessary produced the people who made white America change its laws.