Howard University
Howard University is a private research university in Washington, D.C., chartered by an Act of Congress on March 2, 1867. It is the flagship Historically Black College and University — the institution most central to the professional formation of Black American leadership across medicine, law, architecture, theology, engineering, and the arts.
- Founded
- 1867 (Act of Congress)
- Type
- Private research university
- Location
- Washington, D.C.
- Accreditation
- Middle States Commission on Higher Education
- Colors
- Blue and white
- Mascot
- The Bison
- Website
- howard.edu
History
Howard University was founded in November 1866 during a meeting of the First Congregational Society of Washington, D.C., and chartered by Congress on March 2, 1867. It was named for General Oliver Otis Howard, a Civil War general who also served as Commissioner of the Freedmen's Bureau — an appointment complicated by Howard's record as a sympathizer toward formerly enslaved people at a time when such sympathy was exceptional and politically costly. Howard served as the university's third president from 1869 to 1874.
Unlike most HBCUs founded in the Reconstruction era, Howard received federal funding from the beginning — a distinction that both elevated the university's resources and subjected it to the particular instabilities of Congressional appropriation politics. The university has received an annual Congressional appropriation for most of its history, though the amount and reliability of that support has fluctuated substantially with the political climate.
The Howard University School of Law, founded in 1869, became one of the principal training grounds for the lawyers who argued and won the civil rights cases of the twentieth century. Thurgood Marshall received his law degree from Howard Law in 1933. Charles Hamilton Houston, who served as dean of the law school from 1929 to 1935, designed the legal strategy that would eventually become Brown v. Board of Education — a strategy executed primarily by Howard Law graduates.
The Howard University College of Medicine, established in 1868, trained more than half of all Black physicians in the United States in the decades after the Civil War — at a time when virtually no other medical school in the country admitted Black students.
Moorland-Spingarn Research Center
The Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University is one of the most significant archives of African American history and culture in the world. It holds more than 200,000 books, 17,000 periodicals, 1,600 manuscript collections, and millions of photographs, prints, and audiovisual materials related to the African diaspora.
The collection includes the personal papers of Frederick Douglass, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Alain Locke, and Ralph Bunche, among many others. It is open to qualified researchers by appointment.
Notable Alumni
A representative selection. Howard has produced more Black PhD holders, physicians, dentists, attorneys, and architects than any other institution in United States history.
Lead attorney in Brown v. Board of Education (1954); first Black Justice of the United States Supreme Court (1967).
49th Vice President of the United States; first woman, first Black American, and first South Asian American to hold the office.
Nobel Laureate in Literature (1993); author of Beloved, Song of Solomon, and The Bluest Eye. The defining novelist of the African American experience.
Nobel Peace Prize laureate (1950); first Black American to receive the Nobel Prize. UN mediator and co-founder of the United Nations Department of Trusteeship.
Pioneered the storage of blood plasma and organized the first large-scale blood banks. His research saved thousands of lives during World War II.
Actor, playwright, director, and civil rights activist. One of the eulogists at the funerals of both Malcolm X and Robert F. Kennedy.