Lincoln University

History

Ashmun Institute was chartered by the Pennsylvania General Assembly on January 1, 1854, named after Jehudi Ashmun, an early manager of the American Colonization Society's settlement in Liberia. The naming reflected the institution's early connection to the colonization movement — the antebellum effort to resettle free Black Americans in Africa — which was deeply controversial among Black Americans, many of whom regarded it as a vehicle for removing free Black people from the United States rather than securing their rights here.

The institution was renamed Lincoln University in 1866, in honor of President Abraham Lincoln, and received a new charter. For the first century of its existence, Lincoln was exclusively male — it did not admit women until 1952. It also served an international student body from its earliest decades, enrolling students from West Africa, the Caribbean, and later from across the African diaspora.

Lincoln has been associated with African nationalist politics more than perhaps any other HBCU. Kwame Nkrumah, who led Ghana to independence in 1957 and became its first president, received his bachelor's degree from Lincoln in 1939. Nnamdi Azikiwe, the first president of Nigeria, also attended Lincoln. The institution's role in educating the leadership of African independence movements is a little-known but significant chapter in twentieth-century political history.

Lincoln became a public university in 1972 when it joined the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education. This transition brought state funding and public university status while maintaining the institution's historically Black character. In January 2026 the university announced a $25 million unrestricted gift from philanthropist MacKenzie Scott — her second to the institution, following a $20 million gift in 2020, and bringing her total giving to Lincoln to $45 million, the largest cumulative philanthropic commitment in the university’s history. Lincoln is led by Brenda A. Allen, its fourteenth president and a member of the class of 1981, who installed a new senior leadership cohort effective April 2026 spanning institutional advancement, digital innovation, and athletics. The period was not without cost: a shooting during homecoming weekend on October 25, 2025 killed one person and injured six others on campus, prompting a review of event security.

The Presidents of African Independence

Lincoln University has produced two African heads of state: Kwame Nkrumah (Ghana, class of 1939) and Nnamdi Azikiwe (Nigeria, attended 1925–1926). Both men were shaped by their time at Lincoln — by the intellectual community of Black American scholars and students, by the tradition of resistance to racial subordination, and by the political education they received in a country that denied them full citizenship while claiming to model democracy for the world. Nkrumah's Pan-Africanist philosophy was deeply influenced by his American HBCU education. The irony that two future presidents of independent African nations were educated at an American HBCU while being denied the full rights of American citizens is one of the defining paradoxes of the HBCU tradition.

Notable Alumni

A representative selection. Alumni records are verified against institutional and published sources. Unverified entries are flagged explicitly — we do not fabricate records.

Significance

Lincoln’s claim on the historical record is one of primacy: chartered in 1854, it is the first institution in the United States established to grant degrees to African Americans, predating the Civil War, the Thirteenth Amendment, and the entire postbellum wave of HBCU founding by more than a decade. Every argument about whether Black Americans were capable of—or entitled to—higher learning was, in Lincoln’s case, answered before emancipation rather than after it.

Its second claim is transnational. No other American institution can account for the undergraduate education of a U.S. Supreme Court justice, the defining poet of the Harlem Renaissance, and the founding heads of state of two African nations. That concentration is not coincidence. Lincoln functioned as a node in a Black Atlantic intellectual network at a moment when the American academy was closed to the people who would go on to dismantle both Jim Crow and European colonial rule—and it did so while its own graduates were denied the citizenship rights their education equipped them to demand.

Source notes: Lincoln University institutional archives; Pennsylvania General Assembly charter records, 1854 and 1866; Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana: The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah (1957); Arnold Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes (1986).