99 Fun Facts About HBCU

What does the acronym HBCU stand for?

Historically Black colleges and universities were founded before 1964 to educate Black Americans shut out by segregation, though today they enrol students of every race.

An HBCU must have been founded before which landmark 1964 law?

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned segregation in public places, yet the pre-1964 cut-off that defines an HBCU was written into the Higher Education Act only in 1986.

Which is the oldest HBCU in the United States?

Cheyney University was founded in 1837 as the Institute for Colored Youth to train Black teachers, and took its present name from the farm it moved to in 1902.

The oldest HBCU began with a Quaker's bequest in which city?

Philadelphia was home to Quaker Richard Humphreys, who left a tenth of his estate for a school to train Black teachers; in 1902 it left the city for a farm 25 miles west.

Which 1890 law required segregated Southern states to fund a Black land-grant college?

The Second Morrill Act made states that shut Black students out of their land-grant colleges fund a separate one; the Black land-grant schools are still known as the 1890 institutions.

The only HBCU outside the mainland United States is in which US territory?

The Virgin Islands' university opened in 1962 as a college and was officially designated an HBCU only in 1986, the sole one in any US territory.

Which HBCU did Oprah Winfrey attend on a full scholarship she won in a speaking contest?

Tennessee State University gave Winfrey a full scholarship after she won an oratory contest; she left for a television job and did not hand in her final paper until 1987.

Kamala Harris joined which sorority, the oldest founded by Black college women, as an undergraduate?

Alpha Kappa Alpha dates from 1908; when Harris joined the 2020 presidential ticket, the campaign was flooded with donations of exactly $19.08 in the sorority's honour.

Howard University, named for a Union general, is in which city?

Washington, DC, has been its home since 1867; the general, Oliver Otis Howard, was then running the Freedmen's Bureau and later served as the university's president.

After the Flexner Report, which two HBCU medical schools survived when the others closed?

Howard and Meharry were the only two of seven Black medical schools left open after the 1910 Flexner Report, whose author urged that all the others be closed.

Which HBCU is a private women's liberal arts school in Atlanta?

Spelman began in 1881 in the basement of Atlanta's Friendship Baptist Church, where two New England teachers taught eleven pupils, some of them formerly enslaved.

Which tycoon's gifts rescued an Atlanta women's seminary, which took his wife's family name in 1884?

John D. Rockefeller met the school's two founders at a church conference in Cleveland, later visited the campus and paid off the debt on its property.

Which HBCU is a private men's liberal arts school in Atlanta?

Morehouse began in 1867 as Augusta Institute, a school for training preachers, and moved to Atlanta in 1879 because its first home hampered recruiting and fund-raising.

Which civil rights leader entered the Atlanta men's HBCU at 15 and graduated in 1948?

Martin Luther King Jr. was admitted after his junior year of high school, when the wartime draft had thinned enrolment; college president Benjamin Mays became his mentor and later gave his eulogy.

Who became the first principal of Tuskegee when it opened in 1881?

Booker T. Washington began classes in a rundown church and shanty with 30 adult students, then bought an abandoned 100-acre plantation that is still the heart of the campus.

In which state is Tuskegee University?

Alabama's legislature funded the school after Lewis Adams, a Black community leader, offered a white state senate candidate Black votes in the 1880 election in return for it.

Which HBCU's marching band is nicknamed the Marching 100?

Florida A&M University's Marching 100 was picked by the French government as the official US representative at the 1989 Bastille Day bicentennial parade in Paris.

What are Florida A&M's sports teams called?

The Rattlers' sprinter Bob Hayes won the Olympic 100 metres in 1964 as the 'World's Fastest Human', then helped the Dallas Cowboys win a Super Bowl as a receiver.

Which Tennessee HBCU was saved from debt in the 1870s when its Jubilee Singers toured America and Europe?

Fisk University's student singers left Nashville in 1871 with the school's last funds for travel money, later sang for Queen Victoria, and raised enough to build Jubilee Hall.

Ashmun Institute, the first degree-granting HBCU, was renamed in 1866 in honour of which American?

Abraham Lincoln had been assassinated a year earlier; the Pennsylvania school, chartered in 1854, became Lincoln University on 4 April 1866.

Which Virginia HBCU, founded in 1868, did Tuskegee's founder attend as a student?

Hampton admitted the 16-year-old after a journey of some 500 miles, much of it on foot; his entrance test was to sweep a classroom, and he paid his way by working as the janitor.

Which educator opened a Florida school for Black girls in 1904 with $1.50, the seed of an HBCU bearing her name?

Mary McLeod Bethune began with five girls and her own son, made desks from discarded crates and sold sweet potato pies to raise funds; the school is now Bethune-Cookman University.

What collective nickname is given to the historically Black Greek-letter organizations?

The Divine Nine are five fraternities and four sororities; the oldest, Alpha Phi Alpha, was founded in 1906 not at a Black college but at Cornell, in the Ivy League.

At which HBCU was the National Pan-Hellenic Council, the umbrella body for Black fraternities and sororities, founded in 1930?

Howard University was a natural birthplace: five of the council's member fraternities and sororities had been founded on its campus between 1908 and 1920.

Which organisation's long-running fundraising slogan is 'A mind is a terrible thing to waste'?

The United Negro College Fund was founded in 1944 so that private Black colleges could raise money collectively through one national appeal.

What are the two historically Black NCAA Division I athletic conferences?

The MEAC and the SWAC compete in Division I; the two older Black-college leagues, the CIAA, founded in 1912, and the SIAC, founded in 1913, play in Division II.

The Bayou Classic pits Southern University against which school?

Grambling State and Southern first met in 1932, but the game became the Bayou Classic only in 1974; a Battle of the Bands between the schools' marching bands is part of the weekend.

Where is the Bayou Classic usually played?

The Superdome in New Orleans has been the game's home since the 1970s; after Hurricane Katrina damaged it, the 2005 game moved to Houston.

Four freshmen from which HBCU began the 1960 Greensboro lunch-counter sit-ins?

North Carolina A&T's four sat down at a whites-only Woolworth's counter on 1 February 1960 and were denied service; by the end of March sit-ins had spread to 55 cities in 13 states.

Which Supreme Court justice earned both a bachelor's and a law degree at HBCUs?

Thurgood Marshall could not attend the University of Maryland's segregated law school, so he trained at a Black one, finished first in his class, and two years later beat Maryland in court.

Which Hidden Figures mathematician attended West Virginia State, an HBCU?

Katherine Johnson graduated with highest honours in 1937, in mathematics and French; in 1962 John Glenn asked that she personally recheck the computer's orbital calculations before his flight.

Which HBCU did record-holding NFL receiver Jerry Rice attend?

Mississippi Valley State drew Rice with coach Archie 'Gunslinger' Cooley's pass-heavy offence; its stadium is now named for Rice and his quarterback, Willie Totten.

Which Mississippi HBCU produced Hall of Fame running back Walter Payton and later hired Deion Sanders as head coach?

Jackson State's Payton retired as the NFL's career rushing leader; Sanders coached there from 2020 to 2022, reaching two Celebration Bowls before leaving for Colorado.

Which film director made his first student film while studying at the Atlanta men's HBCU?

Spike Lee shot Last Hustle in Brooklyn as a student, then drew on his college years for School Daze, his 1988 film about fraternity and sorority members clashing with classmates at a Black college.

George Washington Carver left which state's agricultural college in 1896 to teach at Tuskegee?

Iowa State gave Carver his master's degree in 1896; at Tuskegee he taught farmers to rotate cotton with peanuts and sweet potatoes, which restored the soil that cotton had exhausted.

Which Louisiana HBCU's marching band is known as the Human Jukebox?

Southern University's band, founded in 1947, grew famous under Isaac Greggs, the alumnus who directed it for 36 years and paired it with the Fabulous Dancing Dolls in 1969.

In the 1930s, many HBCUs hired refugee professors who had fled which regime?

Nazi Germany drove Jewish scholars from their posts in 1933; many found American universities cool or hostile, and about 50 took jobs at Black colleges in the segregated South.

Which New Orleans university, founded by Saint Katharine Drexel, is the only Catholic HBCU?

Xavier University of Louisiana was founded in 1925 by Drexel, a banking heiress who became a nun and gave her inheritance to schools for Black and Native American children.

In US higher education, what does the federal designation 'PBI' stand for?

Predominantly Black Institution is a label earned by present-day enrolment, at least 40% Black undergraduates, so a college can qualify without any history as an HBCU.

Which chart-topping rapper graduated from Texas Southern, a Houston HBCU, in 2021?

Megan Thee Stallion kept studying health administration through her rise to fame, saying she wanted to make her late mother proud and to open assisted-living homes in her hometown.

Tuskegee's campus was designed by architect Robert Robinson Taylor, the first Black graduate of which university?

MIT enrolled Taylor in 1888 and graduated him in 1892 as the first accredited Black architect; his great-granddaughter Valerie Jarrett became a senior adviser to President Obama.

Which Texas HBCU's 1930s debate team inspired the Denzel Washington film The Great Debaters?

Wiley College's team, coached by poet Melvin Tolson, beat the reigning national champions in 1935; the film swapped that opponent, the University of Southern California, for Harvard.

At an 1847 national Black convention, which famous orator voted against founding a separate Black college?

Frederick Douglass was outvoted: Alexander Crummell made the case for a college, and a majority of the delegates backed Crummell's report.

Which Ohio HBCU, founded in 1856, was among the few established before the American Civil War?

Wilberforce University closed when the Civil War broke out; in 1863 Bishop Daniel Payne bought it for the African Methodist Episcopal Church and became the first Black president of an American college.

Which Raleigh HBCU hosted the 1960 student conference that founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee?

Shaw University was Ella Baker's alma mater; she persuaded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to put up $800 to bring sit-in leaders together there in April 1960.

Storer College, an HBCU that closed in 1955, stood in which West Virginia town?

Harpers Ferry, scene of John Brown's 1859 raid, gave the college a charged setting: in 1906 the Niagara Movement, forerunner of the NAACP, held its first American meeting on the campus.

Which fictional HBCU was the setting of the sitcom A Different World?

Hillman College was retooled in season two, when Debbie Allen, an HBCU graduate herself, was brought in because the producers felt the show was not portraying Black college life accurately.

Which president's 1980 executive order created the White House Initiative on HBCUs?

Jimmy Carter signed Executive Order 12232 in August 1980; Ronald Reagan revoked it 13 months later, but only to replace it with an order of his own, and George H. W. Bush added an advisory board in 1989.

Which Beyoncé concert film captured her 2018 Coachella show, staged with an HBCU-style marching band?

Homecoming documents a set built as a tribute to Black college culture, with a full marching band, majorette dancers and a step show; Netflix released it in April 2019.

Which best-selling toy was invented by Lonnie Johnson, a Tuskegee graduate who worked on NASA's Galileo mission?

The Super Soaker idea struck Lonnie Johnson while he was working on a heat pump, and the water gun went on to earn more than $1 billion in sales.

Which sprinter won three golds at the 1960 Rome Olympics after training with an HBCU track team called the Tigerbelles?

Wilma Rudolph wore a leg brace until she was 12 after childhood polio, then became the first American woman to win three track and field golds at one Games.

Which Black Panther star had the College of Fine Arts at his HBCU alma mater renamed in his honour in 2021?

Chadwick Boseman was recruited to play college basketball but chose the arts instead, graduating in 2000 with a degree in directing.

The HBCU campus sitcom A Different World began as a spin-off of which hit NBC family comedy?

The Cosby Show sent daughter Denise Huxtable, played by Lisa Bonet, off to college, though Bonet left the spin-off after its first season.

Which Motown band, known for Brick House and Easy, was formed by Tuskegee Institute freshmen in 1968?

The Commodores won the campus freshman talent contest in their early days, and had their greatest success with Lionel Richie as co-lead singer.

Which 2002 film stars Nick Cannon as a New York freshman at the fictional HBCU Atlanta A&T?

Drumline builds to a showdown between its fictional band and a real one, Atlanta's Morris Brown College, settled by a percussion face-off.

Which Nobel Prize-winning novelist graduated from an HBCU in 1953 and later returned there to teach English?

Toni Morrison toured the Deep South with her university's theatre troupe as a student, a defining experience of her life.

Which carmaker has put its name on both a Battle of the Bands showcase and the Campus All-Star Challenge quiz for HBCUs?

Honda launched its Campus All-Star Challenge quiz for Black colleges in 1989, and added the marching band showcase in Atlanta in 2003.

Which Hall of Fame defensive end, a Super Bowl winner with the Giants, played college football at Texas Southern?

Michael Strahan set a Texas Southern record with 41.5 career sacks, following his uncle Art, who had played the same position there.

Which tennis pioneer graduated from a Tallahassee HBCU in 1953, four years before she won Wimbledon?

Althea Gibson attended on a full athletic scholarship, and in the 1960s also became the first Black player on the women's professional golf tour.

Which quarterback from a Louisiana HBCU became the first Black starter at his position to win a Super Bowl?

Doug Williams threw four touchdown passes in a single quarter of Super Bowl XXII against Denver and was named the game's MVP.

Which philanthropist, once married to Amazon's founder, has given more than $1 billion to HBCUs since 2020?

MacKenzie Scott's gifts mostly come with no strings attached, leaving each school to decide how to spend them, and she has pledged to give away at least half her wealth.

Which Harlem Renaissance writer co-founded The Hilltop, her HBCU's student newspaper, before turning to folklore?

Zora Neale Hurston began her studies there in 1918, later trained as an anthropologist and gathered Black folklore in Florida for Mules and Men.

Which scholar published The Souls of Black Folk while a professor at Atlanta University and later co-founded the NAACP?

W. E. B. Du Bois joined Atlanta University in 1897 as a professor of history and economics, and went on to edit the NAACP's journal, The Crisis.

Which Invisible Man author was admitted to Tuskegee Institute in 1933 because its orchestra needed a trumpet player?

Ralph Ellison left in 1936 without finishing his degree and moved to Harlem, hoping at first to study sculpture.

Which Olympic 100 metres champion from a Tallahassee HBCU is the only athlete to also win a Super Bowl ring?

Bob Hayes tied the 100 metres world record at the 1964 Tokyo Games, then helped the Dallas Cowboys to their first Super Bowl victory after the 1971 season.

Which billionaire investor told the 2019 graduating class of an Atlanta HBCU that he would pay off their student loans?

Robert F. Smith made the surprise pledge in his commencement speech, covering a reported $34 million owed by the 396 graduates and their families.

Which federal agency, set up as the Civil War ended and closed in 1872, played a major role in financing early HBCUs?

The Freedmen's Bureau turned over confiscated mansions, government buildings, books and furniture to school superintendents, and also handed out millions of food rations.

Which 1901 autobiography was written by the founding principal of Tuskegee Institute?

Up from Slavery became a best-seller, following its author from a childhood in bondage to his years building up the school.

Which Alcorn graduate became the NAACP's first field secretary in Mississippi and was murdered at his home in 1963?

Medgar Evers was junior class president and competed in debate, football and track at college, then led efforts to desegregate the University of Mississippi.

Which future first president of Ghana earned his bachelor's degree at a Pennsylvania HBCU in 1939?

Kwame Nkrumah enrolled on the advice of Nigeria's Nnamdi Azikiwe, a fellow alumnus, and led Ghana from independence in 1957 until 1966.

Which Texas Southern debate champion won national fame with her televised speech at the 1974 Nixon impeachment hearings?

Barbara Jordan's college debate team tied Harvard, and in 1976 she became the first African American to give a Democratic convention keynote.

Which Virginia Union graduate became the first African American elected governor of a US state, taking office in 1990?

Douglas Wilder, the grandson of enslaved people, volunteered for combat duty in the Korean War before entering Virginia politics.

Which Hall of Fame tight end, a seventh-round pick from Savannah State, won two Super Bowls with the Denver Broncos?

Shannon Sharpe was the first NFL tight end to pass 10,000 receiving yards, and later co-hosted the sports debate show Undisputed.

Which HBCU, the only one in Oklahoma, is named after the first African American congressman elected from Virginia?

Langston University took the name in 1941, having opened in 1897 as a land-grant school, and is the westernmost four-year public HBCU in the country.

Which Baltimore HBCU, once the Centenary Biblical Institute, was renamed in 1890 after a clergyman who donated land?

Morgan State honours the Reverend Lyttleton Morgan, the first chairman of its board of trustees; the public university stands outside Maryland's state system.

Which HBCU, founded in 1876 on a former plantation, is the second-oldest public college in Texas?

Prairie View A&M was authorised as a branch of the state's agricultural college, and it still belongs to the Texas A&M University System.

Which Greensboro school is one of only two HBCUs that enroll only women, alongside a better-known one in Atlanta?

Bennett College opened in 1873 as a coeducational teacher-training school and became a four-year women's college in 1926.

Which annual game, first played in the 2015 season in Atlanta, decides the Black college football national championship?

The Celebration Bowl pairs the champions of the two Division I Black college conferences, who sit out the FCS playoffs because the game falls during them.

Founded in 1912, which conference of HBCUs is the oldest African American athletic conference in the United States?

The CIAA began life as the Colored Intercollegiate Athletic Association and only swapped the first word for Central in 1950; its schools now compete in NCAA Division II.

In 1944's Secret Game, coach John McLendon's HBCU basketball team defied segregation to play which school?

Duke medical students, an all-white team, met McLendon's players in a locked gym in what is believed to be the South's first integrated college basketball game.

Which Virginia HBCU stunned second-seeded Missouri in 2012 on its first trip to the NCAA men's basketball tournament?

Norfolk State, whose teams are the Spartans, became only the fifth 15th seed ever to knock out a No. 2 seed.

Edward Waters University and Atlanta's Morris Brown College were both founded by members of which Black denomination?

The AME Church was the first independent Black denomination in the United States, and Morris Brown College is named after its second bishop.

Which abolitionist group, founded in 1846, helped create Talladega College, Tougaloo College and Atlanta University?

The American Missionary Association stepped up its school-building during and after the Civil War, establishing eleven colleges in Southern states.

Which Sears, Roebuck president teamed up with Tuskegee's founder to build close to 5,000 schools for Black children?

Julius Rosenwald made local communities raise matching funds, and by 1928 the schools served about one-third of the South's rural Black schoolchildren.

Oakwood University, the Huntsville HBCU where the gospel sextet Take 6 formed, is run by which Christian denomination?

Seventh-day Adventists opened the school in 1896 on a plantation once owned by the enslavers of Dred Scott, and it remains the church's only HBCU.

Which Dallas HBCU scrapped its football programme in 2007 and turned the unused stadium into a working urban farm?

Paul Quinn College built its WE over Me Farm with PepsiCo to bring healthy food to a part of the city where fresh groceries were hard to find.

Hale Woodruff's celebrated murals at Talladega College depict the 1839 revolt aboard which slave ship?

La Amistad is also set into the floor of the college library, where school tradition says the image must never be stepped on.

Which minister, the first African American to sit in the US Senate, became the first president of Alcorn in 1871?

Hiram Revels served about a year in the Senate, then led the new college, taking leave in 1873 to act as Mississippi's secretary of state.

At which HBCU did police kill three students in 1968 after protests over a segregated bowling alley in Orangeburg?

South Carolina State students had staged a sit-in at the bowling alley two days earlier; the gunfire also wounded 28 people, two years before the Kent State shootings.

Which Salisbury HBCU hosted Biddle University in 1892 for the first football game between two Black colleges?

Livingstone College lost by a single score on a converted cow pasture covered in snow, in a game remembered as the birth of Black college football.

Which 1988 musical film, set at fictional Mission College in Atlanta, tackles colourism and fraternity hazing?

School Daze stars Laurence Fishburne and Giancarlo Esposito, and features a campus protest demanding that the college divest from apartheid-era South Africa.

Which Fame star, herself an HBCU graduate, directed 83 episodes of A Different World after being hired to revamp it?

Debbie Allen was brought in after the first season because the sitcom was not portraying life on a Black college campus accurately.

Which future Knicks guard averaged 41.5 points a game for Winston-Salem State in the 1966–67 season?

Earl Monroe scored 1,329 points that season, and a local sportswriter's name for his baskets, Earl's pearls, gave him his nickname, the Pearl.

Which coach retired in 1997 with 408 wins after leading one Louisiana HBCU's football team across 56 years?

Eddie Robinson built a small-college powerhouse in an era when Black players were not allowed to play for Southern university programmes.

Which Empire star, an Oscar nominee, studied electrical engineering at one HBCU before switching to drama at another?

Taraji P. Henson played Cookie Lyon in the series, and earned her Academy Award nomination for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

Which physicist and astronaut, a graduate of a Greensboro HBCU, died aboard the space shuttle Challenger in 1986?

Ronald McNair became the second Black American in space in 1984, and was an accomplished saxophonist who planned to record a solo in orbit.

Which Tuskegee-educated radio host was dubbed the Fly Jock for commuting by plane between Dallas and Chicago every day?

Tom Joyner kept up the daily flights for eight years, and later set up a foundation that funds scholarships and endowments at Black colleges.

Which singer of Killing Me Softly with His Song entered an HBCU at 15 on a full music scholarship?

Roberta Flack was one of the youngest students the university had ever accepted, graduated at 19, and taught school before her recording career took off.

Which Boston Celtics guard, winner of ten NBA titles, played his college basketball at North Carolina Central?

Sam Jones trails only his teammate Bill Russell for NBA championships won as a player, and was part of eight straight Celtics titles from 1959 to 1966.