Teachers and Preachers georgia avenue and howard place nw
As the Civil War ended in 1865, most formerly enslaved African Americans arriving in the District could not read or write. In 1867 the First Congregational Society, after considering opening a school to train teachers and preachers, instead established Howard University to teach liberal arts. The university has graduated such notables as Vernon Jordan, Toni Morrison, Jessye Norman, and Andrew Young. During the segregation era (1880s-1950s), white universities discriminated in their hiring. But Howard hired African Americans with PhDs, assembling a faculty of extraordinary gifts and accomplishments. Luminaries included historian Carter G. Woodson, philosopher Alain Locke, sociologists Kelly Miller and E. Franklin Frazier, artist Lois Mailou Jones, and educator Lucy Diggs Slowe. Appointed in 1926 as Howard’s first black president, the Reverend Mordecai W. Johnson elevated Howard from a small, underfunded institution into “the Capstone,” a highly respected, PhD-granting university. In the early 1930s, under Dean Charles Hamilton Houston, Howard’s law school trained future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. The two later led an NAACP team whose efforts eventually toppled legal segregation in America, including in public schools ( Brown v. Board of Education , 1954). On that team were Howard law professors James M. Nabrit (later Howard president), George E.C. Hayes, William H. Hastie, and Spottswood Robinson III, and historian John Hope Franklin. Atop the hill is Howard Hall (1869), originally home to the Civil War hero for whom the university is named. General Oliver Otis Howard led the Freedmen’s Bureau, helped found the school, and served as its third president.
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