Historical Tidbits
Black
College Firsts
- Lincoln University
in Southern Chester County, Pennsylvania is the oldest Black institution
of higher learning. A Presbyterian
minister named John Miller Dickey founded it in 1854. He had become frustrated because he
could not get Ralston Amos, the treasurer of the national African
Methodist Episcopal church, admitted into Princeton University Seminary or
at a Presbyterian religious academy.
- Wilberforce University
in Ohio was the first institution of higher learning founded by
Blacks. The national African
Methodist Episcopal church purchased it in 1862 and merged it with the
A.M.E. Union Seminary a year later.
- Tuskegee Institute (now
University) was founded in Tuskegee, Alabama in 1881. It first
opened as the Tuskegee Normal School with Booker T. Washington as its
first principal. White teachers
would not or were not expected to work under a Black man. Therefore, Tuskegee became the first
Black institution of higher learning with an all Black faculty.
(See Jubilee: The Emergence of African-American
Culture, edited by Howard Dodson, pp. 155, 169–161)