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Lift Every Voice
Georgia Avenue./Pleasant Plains Heritage Trail
9 Teachers and Preachers
As the Civil War was ended in 1865, most formerly enslaved African Americans arriving in the District could not read or write. The following year members of the First Congregational Society considered organizing a school to train teachers and preachers to educate them. Instead in 1867 the society went further and established Howard University to educate youth "in the liberal arts and sciences." 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 Prazier, 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. |