American Black Upper Class - History of College Education

History of College Education

During the American Civil War in the 1860s, organizations like the American Missionary Association, which had sponsored elementary schools for Southern blacks, established some of the first historically black colleges and universities. These included Fisk University, Hampton Institute, Tuskegee Institute and Tougaloo College. Those who attended these schools, as well as such other black colleges as Howard University, Morehouse College and Spelman College, were able to acquire skills and academic knowledge that put them in a distinctly different class. Cheyney University, founded in 1837,Lincoln University, PA founded in 1854, and Wilberforce University founded in 1856, were the only black colleges operational prior to the American Civil War, these schools were located in the North. There had been, however, a few predominantly white colleges, such as Oberlin College in Ohio and Berea College in Kentucky in the south, that had accepted black students even before the war, and their black graduates had been given a head start on economic stability.

Since the founding of the historically black schools, often attended originally by the children of skilled former slaves who'd been able to establish businesses or farms in the post-war period, several generations of many families have often become alumni of Howard, Fisk, Tuskegee, Dillard, Hampton, Morehouse, and Spelman. While today there are well over one hundred historically black colleges and universities (HBCU's) in the U.S., these early institutions have consistently been the favorites for upper-class blacks. Howard University and Morehouse College, in particular, have been considered by the Black intelligentsia to be the premier historically black colleges.

However, since integration, the majority of the black upper class have attended predominantly white colleges and universities. Although, as researchers have noted, "in the first time period covered by the scholars, black colleges were attracting significant numbers of students from professional, middle-class black families are now the students who are cherry-picked by highly selective, prestigious institutions that weren’t looking for them in the 1970s", said Michael L. Lomax, president of the United Negro College Fund.

A small number of free blacks during the 19th century were also admitted into private, predominately white institutions such as Harvard, Amherst and, again, Oberlin College.