Coppin State University

History

Coppin State University was established in 1900 by the Baltimore City School Board as a one-year teacher training program at Colored High School (later renamed Frederick Douglass High School) on Pennsylvania Avenue — the central artery of Black Baltimore. The program was designed to prepare Black women for careers as elementary school teachers in the city’s segregated public schools. It was named in honor of Fanny Jackson Coppin, one of the most significant Black educators of the nineteenth century, who had died in 1913 after decades of transformative work as principal of the Institute for Colored Youth in Philadelphia and as an educational missionary in South Africa.

The institution expanded steadily through the mid-twentieth century. By 1938, the curriculum had grown to four years, with authority granted to award the Bachelor of Science degree, and the institution was renamed Coppin Teachers College. In 1950, Coppin became part of Maryland’s state higher education system under the Department of Education — a transition that provided greater financial stability but also placed it within a state system that remained racially unequal in its resource distribution. Coppin moved to its current 38-acre campus on West North Avenue in 1952.

The institution was renamed Coppin State College in 1967 and formally elevated to university status in 1988, when it was incorporated into the University System of Maryland. This transition coincided with Coppin’s expansion beyond teacher education into nursing, criminal justice, and the arts and sciences — reflecting the changed workforce needs of Baltimore and the growing professional aspirations of the urban Black community it primarily serves.

Coppin State’s location in West Baltimore places it in one of the most historically and demographically complex urban environments in the United States — a city that produced Frederick Douglass, Billie Holiday, and Thurgood Marshall, and that has been both a site of remarkable Black cultural production and of the concentrated poverty, residential segregation, and police violence that have shaped the American urban crisis.

Fanny Jackson Coppin: The Woman Behind the Name

Fanny Jackson Coppin was born into slavery in Washington, D.C., around 1837 and was purchased out of slavery by her aunt. She went on to earn a degree from Oberlin College in 1865 — one of the first Black women in the United States to hold a college degree — and was appointed principal of the Institute for Colored Youth in Philadelphia, where she served from 1869 to 1902, transforming the school into one of the leading Black educational institutions in the country.

Coppin established a normal and industrial department at the Institute, insisted on rigorous academic standards, and advocated for industrial and vocational training as a practical complement to classical education — positions that placed her in a complex relationship with both the Washingtonian and Du Boisian camps that would dominate Black educational debate after her death. In 1902, she accompanied her husband, AME Bishop Levi Coppin, to South Africa as an educational missionary. She died in 1913. The university named in her honor is one of the few HBCUs — and fewer still public HBCUs — named for a Black woman.

Notable Alumni

A representative selection. We are expanding this section as records are verified.

Significance

Coppin State University is the only public HBCU in Maryland and one of a small number of HBCUs embedded in a major American city serving a predominantly Black urban population. Its West Baltimore location places it at the center of one of the country’s most persistent urban crises — a city that has experienced sustained disinvestment, mass incarceration, and the human consequences of policies that concentrated poverty in Black neighborhoods. Coppin’s nursing, social work, and criminal justice programs directly engage these realities, training practitioners who return to the communities the university serves.

As a member of the University System of Maryland, Coppin has navigated the persistent challenge faced by public HBCUs within state systems: securing equitable resource allocation from a state apparatus that historically underfunded Black public institutions. A 2021 settlement between the state of Maryland and historically Black Morgan State and Coppin State universities resulted in a multi-year commitment of additional state funding to address documented inequities — a landmark recognition of the systemic underfunding that had shaped both institutions for decades.

The university’s namesake, Fanny Jackson Coppin, makes it one of the very few public HBCUs named for a Black woman — a distinction that carries particular resonance given Coppin’s own trajectory from slavery to one of the most consequential educational positions held by any Black person in the nineteenth century. Her story is embedded in the institution’s identity in ways that go beyond nominal.

Recent enrollment data signal a measurable reversal of the contraction that long shadowed the institution. Under President Anthony L. Jenkins, Coppin welcomed its largest incoming class in more than twenty-five years in fall 2025, with notable gains in male enrollment — a trend the university highlighted at its 2025 convocation and one that runs counter to the enrollment pressures facing many regional public institutions. That momentum has continued into 2026: the university received a record 23,000-plus undergraduate applications for the incoming class, reported a 75 percent overall retention rate and a 77 percent male retention rate — both the highest marks in institutional history and well above the national retention average for Black male college students — and celebrated the Class of 2026 at its 126th commencement. Coppin has paired that enrollment growth with an affordability push, cutting residential board-plan costs 12 percent for the 2026–2027 academic year. In fall 2026 Coppin enrolled the largest incoming class in its history — more than 1,500 new students, including 1,241 first-year students, a 61 percent jump over the prior year, and 287 transfer students — selected from a pool of more than 24,000 applications. The university reported that overall enrollment has risen roughly 75 percent since 2022 and that male enrollment grew 42 percent year over year, extending a recruitment and retention turnaround that has run counter to the enrollment pressures facing many regional public institutions.

Source notes: This entry draws from: Coppin State University institutional history (coppin.edu/csu-history); Maryland State Archives, Coppin State University profile; Wikipedia, "Coppin State University"; Stephanie Ready biographical details from published NBA and G League records. Fanny Jackson Coppin biographical information from: Linda M. Perkins, Fanny Jackson Coppin and the Institute for Colored Youth, 1865–1902 (1987). The 2021 Maryland HBCU equity settlement is documented in Maryland Senate Bill 1 (2021 Special Session). Facts verified against multiple sources; discrepancies noted in the corrections log.