Historically black colleges and universities number over one hundred institutions of higher learning. With a few exceptions, such as the Institute of Colored Youth, which became Pennsylvania’s Cheyney State University these institutions were established following the Civil War. Some, like the Hampton Institute of Virginia, were founded by missionary associations, while many were established by black denominations like the AME church to provide education for members and to train clergy.

The independent black educational institute became nationally renowned with the rise to prominence of Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee in Alabama. But the growth of the NAACP brought a challenge to the notion of racially segregated education, and support for such institutions began to wane significantly in the 1920s. Campus strikes and protests during that decade over the demands for increased black faculty placed continued pressure on college administrations and presaged the coming black militancy that would flower in the 1950s on many campuses around the South.

During the early years of the Civil Rights movement, students at black colleges like Fisk in Nashville and North Carolina A&T in Raleigh developed lunch-counter sit-ins in five and dimes, and became key participants in freedom rides and registration campaigns of Freedom Summer (see Ann Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi, 1968).

The radicalism/alienation of many of the students, out of step with conservative and elitist administrations, was captured in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952).

The NAACP’s achievement in persuading the Supreme Court to make its 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision had a significant impact on black colleges. Integration resulted in the loss of many of the best black students and athletes to the leading white colleges and universities. Lincoln University which had trained many prominent black lawyers and had a celebrated football program, now trained fewer attorneys and was forced to close down football in the early 1960s.

In the 1980s a financial revival began to occur at many of the colleges. Members of the black middle class felt that white-dominated institutions discriminated against them and so began to encourage their children to consider black colleges. This was matched by increased contributions to the National Negro College Fund (with its successful advertising slogan, “a mind is a terrible thing to waste”), placing the institutions on a more secure footing. Connected to this change was the growing public image of the colleges fostered by the success of Bill Cosby and the Cosby Show (NBC, 1984–92). The Huxtables sent their eldest daughter to Princeton, but their second chose Hillman (loosely modeled on Spellman) and another went to Lincoln; Hillman became the setting for the spin-off A Different World (NBC, 1987–93). Cosby also supported these institutions: in 1986 he donated $1.3 million to Fisk and later gave the same amount to Central State, Howard, Florida A&M and Shaw. In 1988 he gave $1.5 million each to Meharry Medical College and Bethune Cookman College. His donation to Atlanta’s Spellman, in 1989, was of a different order, amounting to $20 million. While such largesse has fostered the continued viability of black colleges, they continue to face financial difficulties and, owing to their perceived inferior status, problems retaining faculty and attracting students.