HBCU Trivia
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99 free HBCU trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
43 free HBCU trivia questions with answers. Historically Black colleges and universities have educated a huge share of Black America's leaders, from Martin Luther King Jr. to Kamala Harris, and this quiz covers their history and culture. Expect questions on the oldest HBCU (Cheyney, 1837), the Second Morrill Act, Howard, Spelman and Morehouse, Booker T. Washington and Tuskegee, FAMU's Marching 100, the Divine Nine fraternities and sororities, the SWAC and MEAC, the Bayou Classic, and alumni from Thurgood Marshall to Jerry Rice. Easy questions ask what HBCU stands for and who founded Tuskegee. The hard ones want the number of states that once excluded Black students from land-grant colleges, the family behind Spelman's name and the orator who argued against separate colleges in 1847. It suits a Black History Month event, a classroom or a homecoming quiz. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on HBCUs and individual schools, and each question carries the sentence that backs it up.
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Q 01What does the acronym HBCU stand for?
Historically Black colleges and universities
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.
Q 02An HBCU must have been founded before which landmark 1964 law?
The Civil Rights Act
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.
Q 03Which is the oldest HBCU in the United States?
Cheyney University
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.
Q 04The oldest HBCU began with a Quaker's bequest in which city?
Philadelphia
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.
Q 05Which 1890 law required segregated Southern states to fund a Black land-grant college?
The Second Morrill Act
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.
Q 06The only HBCU outside the mainland United States is in which US territory?
Virgin Islands
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.
Q 07Which HBCU did Oprah Winfrey attend on a full scholarship she won in a speaking contest?
Tennessee State University
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.
Q 08Kamala Harris joined which sorority, the oldest founded by Black college women, as an undergraduate?
Alpha Kappa Alpha
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.
Q 09Howard University, named for a Union general, is in which city?
Washington, DC
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.
Q 10After the Flexner Report, which two HBCU medical schools survived when the others closed?
Howard and Meharry
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.
Q 11Which HBCU is a private women's liberal arts school in Atlanta?
Spelman
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.
Q 12Which tycoon's gifts rescued an Atlanta women's seminary, which took his wife's family name in 1884?
John D. Rockefeller
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.
Q 13Which HBCU is a private men's liberal arts school in Atlanta?
Morehouse
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.
Q 21Which Virginia HBCU, founded in 1868, did Tuskegee's founder attend as a student?
Hampton
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.
Q 22Which educator opened a Florida school for Black girls in 1904 with $1.50, the seed of an HBCU bearing her name?
Mary McLeod Bethune
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.
Q 23What collective nickname is given to the historically Black Greek-letter organizations?
The Divine Nine
Q 14Which civil rights leader entered the Atlanta men's HBCU at 15 and graduated in 1948?
Martin Luther King Jr.
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.
Q 15Who became the first principal of Tuskegee when it opened in 1881?
Booker T. Washington
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.
Q 16In which state is Tuskegee University?
Alabama
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.
Q 17Which HBCU's marching band is nicknamed the Marching 100?
Florida A&M University
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.
Q 18What are Florida A&M's sports teams called?
The Rattlers
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.
Q 19Which Tennessee HBCU was saved from debt in the 1870s when its Jubilee Singers toured America and Europe?
Fisk University
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.
Q 20Ashmun Institute, the first degree-granting HBCU, was renamed in 1866 in honour of which American?
Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln had been assassinated a year earlier; the Pennsylvania school, chartered in 1854, became Lincoln University on 4 April 1866.
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.
Q 24At which HBCU was the National Pan-Hellenic Council, the umbrella body for Black fraternities and sororities, founded in 1930?
Howard University
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.
Q 25Which organisation's long-running fundraising slogan is 'A mind is a terrible thing to waste'?
The United Negro College Fund
The United Negro College Fund was founded in 1944 so that private Black colleges could raise money collectively through one national appeal.
Q 26What are the two historically Black NCAA Division I athletic conferences?
The MEAC and the SWAC
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.
Q 27The Bayou Classic pits Southern University against which school?
Grambling State
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.
Q 28Where is the Bayou Classic usually played?
The Superdome in New Orleans
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.
Q 29Four freshmen from which HBCU began the 1960 Greensboro lunch-counter sit-ins?
North Carolina A&T
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.
Q 30Which Supreme Court justice earned both a bachelor's and a law degree at HBCUs?
Thurgood Marshall
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.