Chapter 28: A Different World¹: The Social and Educational Objectives of the Historically Black Colleges and Universities Before and After the Brown Decision

When the young W.E.B. Du Bois arrived in Nashville, Tennessee, in September 1885, he knew he was entering “a different world.” Fisk University, founded in 1866, was one of the six colleges and universities and 22 secondary schools opened by the Congregationalist’s American Missionary Association (AMA) for the freedpeople in the South following the Civil War. Despite their more recent organization, however, the institutions of “higher” education for the formerly enslaved African Americans opened by the AMA, the Freedmen’s Aid Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church, the American Baptist Home Mission Society, All Board of Mission Society of the Presbyterian Church, the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, African Methodist Episcopal Zion (AMEZ), and other religious denominations, as well as those started by independent, secular groups, had a great deal in common with colleges and universities that were established for southern Whites. When the colleges were opened for the freedpeople, only a small number of students were enrolled in the “collegiate” department. For example, in five of the AMA-sponsored colleges in 1895 (Fisk, Straight University in New Orleans, Talladega College in Alabama, Tillotson College in Austin, Texas, and Tougaloo College in Mississippi), only 63 students were in collegiate departments, out of a total enrollment of 2,253. The vast majority of students were in the elementary, grammar, and preparatory divisions (MacPherson, 1975).