Morehouse College

History

Morehouse College was founded in 1867 in Augusta, Georgia, as the Augusta Institute, under the auspices of the American Baptist Home Mission Society. It was established to train Black men for the ministry and teaching. In 1879, the institution relocated to Atlanta and was renamed Atlanta Baptist Seminary. In 1913, it became Morehouse College, named for Henry L. Morehouse, corresponding secretary of the American Baptist Home Mission Society.

The most consequential figure in Morehouse's intellectual history is Benjamin E. Mays, who served as president from 1940 to 1967. Mays transformed the college into a nationally recognized liberal arts institution and, perhaps more importantly, served as mentor and spiritual father figure to a young Martin Luther King Jr., who enrolled at Morehouse at the age of fifteen in 1944.

The Morehouse tradition — the "Morehouse Man" — is centered on service leadership, intellectual excellence, and the obligation to use one's education to advance the community from which one came. This tradition is formalized and reinforced throughout the Morehouse experience in a way that distinguishes its institutional culture.

Morehouse, Spelman, and the other institutions of the Atlanta University Center Consortium form the most concentrated cluster of Black higher education in the world — sharing curricula, libraries, and social life across a contiguous campus in southwest Atlanta.

In July 2025, F. DuBois Bowman — a public health scholar and 1992 Morehouse graduate — became the college's 13th president, succeeding David A. Thomas, who had led the institution since 2018. Bowman was formally inaugurated on February 12, 2026, during the college's 159th Founder's Day. In U.S. News & World Report's 2026 rankings, Morehouse rose to No. 3 among historically Black colleges and universities nationally, up from No. 5 the prior year. In the 2027 edition, released September 22, 2026, Morehouse held its place among the nation’s top four HBCUs and climbed thirteen positions to No. 83 among national liberal arts colleges, while ranking the No. 1 HBCU for undergraduate teaching (No. 31 nationally) and for first-year experiences. Selectivity has tightened sharply alongside that ascent: the Class of 2029 drew a record 6,217 applications and an admit rate of 33 percent, down from 44 percent in 2024 and 52 percent in 2023. An 88,000-square-foot, 324-bed residence hall is scheduled for completion in 2026, the first phase of a campus expansion intended to support enrollment growth.

Martin Luther King Jr., Class of 1948

Martin Luther King Jr. enrolled at Morehouse at fifteen, under a wartime early admission program, and graduated in 1948 with a degree in sociology at age nineteen. The intellectual environment at Morehouse — and especially the influence of Benjamin Mays — shaped King's integration of Christian theology with nonviolent resistance philosophy. Mays officiated at King's funeral in 1968.

The connection between Morehouse and the Civil Rights Movement is not incidental — it is constitutive. The tradition of moral seriousness and public service that Morehouse cultivated directly shaped the leadership philosophy of the most transformative civil rights campaign in American history.

Notable Alumni

Source notes: This entry draws from: Morehouse College Archives; Edward A. Jones, A Candle in the Dark: A History of Morehouse College (1967); Lerone Bennett Jr., What Manner of Man (1964) for King's enrollment; and SACSCOC accreditation records. Notable alumni biographical details sourced from contemporaneous published sources and respective institutional records.