BLACK FACTS: HBCUs

[CrimsonTide4]

Lincoln University in Pennsylvania
http://www.lincoln.edu

About Lincoln
A Legacy of Producing Leaders

Lincoln University of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania was chartered in April 1854 as Ashmun Institute. As Horace Mann Bond, ‘23, the eighth president of Lincoln University, so eloquently cites in the opening chapter of his book, Education for Freedom, this was “the first institution found anywhere in the world to provide a higher education in the arts and sciences for male youth of African descent.” The story of Lincoln University goes back to the early years of the 19th century and to the ancestors of its founder, John Miller Dickey, and his wife, Sarah Emlen Cresson. The Institute was renamed Lincoln University in 1866 after President Abraham Lincoln.

Lincoln is surrounded by the rolling farmlands and wooded hilltops of southern Chester County, Pennsylvania. Its campus is conveniently located on Baltimore Pike, about one mile off US Route 1 – 45 miles southwest of Philadelphia, 15 miles northwest of Newark, Delaware, 25 miles west of Wilmington, Delaware, and 55 miles north of Baltimore, Maryland.

Since its inception, Lincoln has attracted an interracial and international enrollment from the surrounding community, region, and around the world. The University admitted women students in 1952, and formally associated with the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in 1972 as a state-related, coeducational university. Lincoln currently enrolls approximately 2,000 students.

Located in southern Chester County, Lincoln is accredited by the Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools and offers academic programs in undergraduate study in the arts, sciences as well as graduate programs in human services, reading, education, mathematics, and administration. The University is proud of its faculty for the high quality of their teaching, research, and service, and of its alumni, among the most notable of whom are: Langston Hughes, ‘29, world-acclaimed poet; Thurgood Marshall, ‘30, first African-American Justice of the US Supreme Court; Hildrus A. Poindexter, ‘24, internationally known authority on tropical diseases; Roscoe Lee Browne, ‘46, author and widely acclaimed actor of stage and screen; Jacqueline Allen, ‘74, judge for the Court of Common Pleas, Philadelphia; and Eric C. Webb, ‘91, author, poet and editor-in-chief of Souls of People.

Many of Lincoln's international graduates have gone on to become outstanding leaders in their countries, including Nnamdi Azikiwe, ‘30, Nigeria's first president; Kwame Nkrumah, ‘39, first president of Ghana; Rev. James Robinson, ‘35, founder of Crossroads Africa, which served as the model for the Peace Corps; and Sibusio Nkomo, Ph.D., ‘81, chairperson, National Policy Institute of South Africa.

During the first one hundred years of its existence, Lincoln graduated approximately 20 percent of the Black physicians and more than 10 percent of the Black attorneys in the United States. Its alumni have headed over 35 colleges and universities and scores of prominent churches. At least 10 of its alumni have served as United States ambassadors or mission chiefs. Many are federal, state and municipal judges, and several have served as mayors or city managers.


Mississippi Valley State University
http://www.mvsu.edu/

The institution, which opened in 1950, was created by the Mississippi state legislature as Mississippi Vocational College. The college changed its name in 1964 to Mississippi Valley State College and was granted university status in 1974.

The legislature anticipated that legal segregation of public education was in danger (and would in four years be declared unconstitutional in the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education) and created the institution, hoping that its existence would draw African-American applicants who might have otherwise applied to attend Mississippi's premier whites-only institutions -- the University of Mississippi, Mississippi State University, and the University of Southern Mississippi. Creating separate institutions of higher learning for Mississippi's black population, the state's political leaders hoped, would help ease the pressure to integrate the state's premier universities.

To attract the support of those who opposed any government action to provide higher education to blacks, those proposing creation of M.V.C. used the term "vocational" to imply that the institution's main purpose would be to train blacks to take on blue-collar jobs.

The original legislative proposal would have located M.V.C. in Greenwood, but the white leadership of that city did not like the idea of hosting an institution that would attract young, ambitious blacks to the area. Thus, the proposed site was moved to Itta Bena. Even that town, however, objected to too close a proximity of a black institution, so the final site was chosen to place the college away from the downtown area, on cheap, uncultivatable land.

The first president of the institution, J. H. White, an African-American, sought to reassure the state's political leaders that the institution would not be a center of black agitation. One of his symbolic acts was to name the college's two most important buildings after prominent segregationists Walter Sillers Jr. and Fielding Wright. After the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown decision, state Gov. Hugh White invited 90 black leaders to support the idea of voluntary segregation of public education in Mississippi. President White was one of only two at the meeting to support the governor. When a young black man, Clyde Kennard, applied to the all-white Mississippi Southern College, President White tried to dissuade him. (Kennard was later framed for his attempts to attend white universities.)

In 1964, Mississippi Vocational College was renamed Mississippi Valley State College.

In 1970, a student boycott was organized to protest President White's administration of the institution. Half the enrolled students of the institution -- about 900 -- were arrested.

In the early 1970s, civil rights leaders continued to protest the inequalities in higher education opportunities offered to whites and blacks in Mississippi. In an effort to defuse some of the criticism, Gov. Bill Waller proposed changing the names of three black institutions from "colleges" to "universities." Thus, in 1974, the institution was renamed again, as Mississippi Valley State University.

In 1998, the university renamed many of the buildings on campus, except for the ones named after Sillers, Wright, and J. H. White.


Famous Alumni
Ashley Ambrose - NFL cornerback
Jerry Rice - former NFL wide receiver
Willie Totten - Head Coach