Historically black colleges and universities
Historically Black colleges and universities are institutions of higher education in the United States that were established before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 with the intention of serving African American students. Most are in the Southern United States and were founded during the Reconstruction era following the American Civil War. Their original purpose was to provide education for African Americans in an era when most colleges and universities in the United States did not allow Black students to enroll.
During the Reconstruction era, most historically Black colleges were founded by Protestant religious organizations. This changed in 1890 with the U.S. Congress' passage of the Second Morrill Act, which required segregated Southern states to provide African Americans with public higher education schools in order to receive the Act's benefits. Separately, during the late 20th century, either after expanding their inclusion of Black people and African Americans into their institutions or gaining the status of minority-serving institution, some institutions came to be called predominantly Black institutions.
For a century after the abolition of American slavery in 1865, almost all colleges and universities in the Southern United States prohibited all African Americans from attending as required by Jim Crow laws in the South, while institutions in other parts of the country regularly employed quotas to limit admission of Black people. HBCUs were established to provide more opportunities to African Americans and are largely responsible for establishing and expanding the African-American middle class. In the 1950s and 1960s, legally enforced racial segregation in education was generally outlawed throughout the South, and other non-discrimination policies were adopted.
There are 107 HBCUs as of 2025 in the United States, representing three percent of the nation's colleges, including public and private institutions. 27 offer doctoral programs, 52 offer master's programs, 83 offer bachelor's degree programs, and 38 offer associate degrees. HBCUs currently produce nearly 20% of all African American college graduates and 25% of African American STEM graduates. Among the graduates of HBCUs are civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., United States Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall, American film director Spike Lee, former United States vice president Kamala Harris and the late American mathematician Katherine Johnson.
History
Medical schools
Following the release of the Flexner Report, "five of the seven Black medical schools in the United States were forced to close, leaving only Howard and Meharry."Private institutions
HBCUs established prior to the American Civil War include Cheyney University of Pennsylvania in 1837, University of the District of Columbia in 1851, and Lincoln University in 1854. Wilberforce University was also established prior to the American Civil War. The university was founded in 1856 via a collaboration between the African Methodist Episcopal Church of Ohio and the predominantly white Methodist Episcopal Church.HBCUs were controversial in their early years. At the 1847 National Convention of Colored People and Their Friends, the famed Black orators Frederick Douglass, Henry Highland Garnet, and Alexander Crummell debated the need for such institutions, with Crummell arguing that HBCUs were necessary to provide freedom from discrimination, and Douglass and Garnet arguing that self-segregation would harm the black community. A majority of the convention voted that HBCUs should be supported.
Most HBCUs were established in the South after the American Civil War, often with the assistance of religious missionary organizations based in the North, especially the American Missionary Association. The Freedmen's Bureau played a major role in financing the new schools.
Atlanta University – now Clark Atlanta University – was founded on September 19, 1865, as the first HBCU in the Southern United States. Atlanta University was the first graduate institution to award degrees to African Americans in the nation and the first to award bachelor's degrees to African Americans in the South; Clark College was the nation's first four-year liberal arts college to serve African-American students. The two consolidated in 1988 to form Clark Atlanta University. Shaw University, founded December 1, 1865, was the second HBCU to be established in the South. The year 1865 also saw the foundation of Storer College in Harper's Ferry, West Virginia. Storer's former campus and buildings have since been incorporated into Harpers Ferry National Historical Park.
Some of these universities eventually became public universities with assistance from the government.
Public institutions
In 1862, the federal government's Morrill Act provided for land grant colleges in each state. Educational institutions established under the Morrill Act in the North and West were open to Black Americans. But 17 states, almost all in the South, required their post-Civil war systems to be segregated and excluded Black students from their land grant colleges. In the 1870s, Mississippi, Virginia, and South Carolina each assigned one African American college land-grant status: Alcorn University, Hampton Institute, and Claflin University, respectively. In response, Congress passed the second Morrill Act of 1890, also known as the Agricultural College Act of 1890, requiring states to establish a separate land grant college for Black students if they were being excluded from the existing land grant college. Many of the HBCUs were founded by states to satisfy the Second Morrill Act. These land grant schools continue to receive annual federal funding for their research, extension, and outreach activities.Predominantly Black institutions
Predominantly Black colleges and universities are those institutions with a 50% or greater enrollment of African American students. These colleges are not to be confused with historically Black colleges and universities. Like HBCUs, PBCUs serve large numbers of African American students. Whereas HBCUs refer to institutions of higher learning founded to educate the descendants of formerly enslaved Africans prior to 1964, PBCUs were not necessarily founded with a mission of educating African Americans.Sports
In the 1920s and 1930s, historically Black colleges developed a strong interest in athletics. Sports were expanding rapidly at state universities, but very few Black stars were recruited there. Race newspapers hailed athletic success as a demonstration of racial progress. Black schools hired coaches, recruited and featured stellar athletes, and set up their own leagues.Jewish refugees
In the 1930s, many Jewish intellectuals fleeing Europe after the rise of Hitler and anti-Jewish legislation in prewar Nazi Germany following Hitler's elevation to power emigrated to the United States and found work teaching in historically Black colleges. In particular, 1933 was a challenging year for many Jewish academics who tried to escape increasingly oppressive Nazi policies, particularly after legislation was passed stripping them of their positions at universities. Jews looking outside of Germany could not find work in other European countries because of calamities like the Spanish Civil War and general antisemitism in Europe. In the US, they hoped to continue their academic careers, but barring a scant few, found little acceptance in elite institutions in Depression-era America, which also had their own undercurrent of antisemitism.As a result of these phenomena, more than two-thirds of the faculty hired at many HBCUs from 1933 to 1945 had come to the United States to escape from Nazi Germany. HBCUs believed the Jewish professors were valuable faculty that would help strengthen their institutions' credibility. HBCUs had a firm belief in diversity and giving opportunity no matter the race, religion, or country of origin. HBCUs were open to Jews because of their ideas of equal learning spaces. They sought to create an environment where all people felt welcome to study, including women.
World War II
HBCUs made substantial contributions to the US war effort. One example is Tuskegee University in Alabama, where the Tuskegee Airmen trained and attended classes.Florida's Black junior colleges
After the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954, the legislature of Florida, with support from various counties, opened eleven junior colleges serving the African American population. Their purpose was to show that separate but equal education was working in Florida. Prior to this, there had been only one junior college in Florida serving African Americans, Booker T. Washington Junior College, in Pensacola, founded in 1949. The new ones were Gibbs Junior College, Roosevelt Junior College, Volusia County Junior College, Hampton Junior College, Rosenwald Junior College, Suwannee River Junior College, Carver Junior College, Collier-Blocker Junior College, Lincoln Junior College, Jackson Junior College, and Johnson Junior College.The new junior colleges began as extensions of Black high schools. They used the same facilities and often the same faculty. Some built their own buildings after a few years. After the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 mandated an end to school segregation, the colleges were all abruptly closed. Only a fraction of the students and faculty were able to transfer to the previously all-white junior colleges, where they found, at best, an indifferent reception.
Since 1965
A reauthorization of the Higher Education Act of 1965 established a program for direct federal grants to HBCUs, to support their academic, financial, and administrative capabilities. Part B specifically provides for formula-based grants, calculated based on each institution's Pell grant eligible enrollment, graduation rate, and percentage of graduates who continue post-baccalaureate education in fields where African Americans are underrepresented. Some colleges with a predominantly Black student body are not classified as HBCUs because they were founded after the implementation of the Sweatt v. Painter and Brown v. Board of Education rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court and the Higher Education Act of 1965.In 1980, Jimmy Carter signed an executive order to distribute adequate resources and funds to strengthen the nation's public and private HBCUs. His executive order created the White House Initiative on historically Black colleges and universities, which is a federally funded program that operates within the U.S. Department of Education. In 1989, George H. W. Bush continued Carter's pioneering spirit by signing Executive Order 12677, which created the presidential advisory board on HBCUs, to counsel the government and the secretary on the future development of these organizations.
Starting in 2001, directors of libraries of several HBCUs began discussions about ways to pool their resources and work collaboratively. In 2003, this partnership was formalized as the HBCU Library Alliance, "a consortium that supports the collaboration of information professionals dedicated to providing an array of resources designed to strengthen historically Black colleges and Universities and their constituents."
In 2015, the Bipartisan Congressional Historically Black Colleges and Universities Caucus was established by U.S. Representatives Alma S. Adams and Bradley Byrne. The caucus advocates for HBCUs on Capitol Hill., there are over 100 elected politicians who are members of the caucus.