# Historically Black Colleges & Universities

*The Black American colleges that built the nation’s professional class: origin, law, and record.*

> Black's Encyclopedia — the sourced record of Black American life.
> Portal: Institutions & Schools · Status: Verified record · Revised: April 14, 2026 · Revisions: 26
> Canonical: https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/hbcus

## Summary

Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) are institutions of higher education established before 1964 with the principal mission of educating Black Americans, a definition fixed in federal law by the Higher Education Act of 1965. Just over one hundred remain in operation, from Cheyney University of Pennsylvania (1837), the oldest, through the land-grant colleges chartered under the Second Morrill Act of 1890.

## The archive's standing

HBCUs are not a lesser tier of American higher education. Measured honestly, output against resources, they are among its most productive institutions. The archive holds the deficit framing as the artifact to be explained, not the schools.

## Origins

Before the Civil War, teaching an enslaved person to read was a crime across most of the South; the first Black colleges, Cheyney (1837), Lincoln (1854), and Wilberforce (1856), rose in the free states. Emancipation opened the floodgates: between 1865 and 1900, Black churches, the Freedmen’s Bureau, and Northern missionary societies chartered scores of colleges across the South, and the Second Morrill Act of 1890 forced the segregating states to fund Black land-grant institutions or lose federal money.

## The record they keep

HBCUs enroll roughly ten percent of Black college students yet produce an outsized share of Black professionals; a substantial portion of the nation’s Black doctors, judges, engineers, and teachers hold HBCU degrees. Howard, Spelman, Morehouse, Tuskegee, Fisk: the names function in the culture as shorthand for an education that never asked its students to explain themselves first.

## Sources

1. Higher Education Act of 1965, Title III, statutory definition of HBCUs.
2. Anderson, James D. The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935. UNC Press, 1988.
3. National Center for Education Statistics. “Historically Black Colleges and Universities.” NCES, 2024.

## Related records

- https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/great-migration
- https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/black-church

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Cite as: Black's Encyclopedia, "Historically Black Colleges & Universities," revised April 14, 2026. https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/hbcus

Text under the Black's Record License: cite the record, keep attribution attached, cite the revision date.