Savannah State University

History

Savannah State University traces its origins to the Second Morrill Land Grant Act of August 30, 1890, which required Southern and border states to establish land-grant institutions for Black students — or forfeit their federal agricultural college funding. Georgia complied by authorizing the Georgia State Industrial College for Colored Youth. The institution opened briefly in Athens before relocating permanently to Savannah on October 7, 1891. Its founding was thus not a voluntary extension of educational opportunity but a federal mandate extracted from a state determined to maintain educational apartheid. That coercive origin does not diminish the institution's achievement — it underscores it.

Major Richard R. Wright Sr., a former enslaved man and Civil War–era graduate of Atlanta University, served as the institution's first president from 1891 to 1921 — a thirty-year tenure that shaped the college's identity as a practical institution preparing Black Georgians for economic self-sufficiency. Wright's leadership model emphasized industrial education, agricultural science, and teacher training, reflecting both the Booker T. Washington–era consensus and the specific demands of a land-grant mission in the Jim Crow South.

The institution underwent a series of name changes that tracked its expanding academic scope. A full four-year degree program was established in 1928. It became Georgia State College in 1932, Savannah State College in 1950, and — with the expansion of graduate programming and research activity — Savannah State University in 1996. SACSCOC accreditation was granted in 1955, formalizing the institution's standing within the regional higher education system.

Located on a 173-acre campus in Savannah, a city with one of the deepest records of African American cultural and political life in the United States, Savannah State sits within a metropolitan area whose history as a port city, a site of Civil War occupation, and a center of the Gullah Geechee cultural corridor gives the institution an unusually rich regional context.

Dr. Jermaine Whirl became the university's fifteenth president in 2025 and was formally invested in April 2026. His early tenure was marked by the reorganization of academic programs into five new colleges and a $5 million corporate gift — the largest single donation in the institution's history. Under the UPROAR 2030 strategic plan, the administration has set a goal of growing enrollment toward 6,000 students and positioning Savannah State among the nation's top-ranked HBCUs.

Notable Alumni

A representative selection from an institution whose graduates have served in military, government, and corporate leadership.

Significance

Savannah State University holds a position that is simultaneously symbolic and structural. As Georgia's oldest public HBCU and one of the Second Morrill Land Grant institutions, it represents a category of institution forged not by private denominational generosity or Northern missionary work, but by federal law applied against the resistance of Southern states. The 1890 Morrill Act's logic was blunt: states could not both receive federal land-grant funds and exclude Black students from those institutions. Savannah State is what happened when that logic was enforced.

The university has produced graduates who have served in senior positions across the federal government, military, and private sector — evidence of an institution that has consistently prepared Black Georgians for leadership at scales that were not anticipated when it was founded as an industrial training school. The trajectory from Georgia State Industrial College for Colored Youth to a comprehensive university with graduate programs and a research mission is itself an argument about the capacity of public investment in Black higher education.

Its location in Savannah — a city whose Black community traces continuous presence back through slavery, Reconstruction, and the twentieth century's civil rights struggle — places the university inside a living historical archive. The Gullah Geechee cultural tradition, centered on the Sea Island communities surrounding the city, gives Savannah State a research and cultural mission that few institutions of its size can claim.

Source notes: This entry draws on Savannah State University institutional records and the African American Registry; the University System of Georgia institutional profile; HBCU Lifestyle and HBCU Money Guide member-institution records; and the Second Morrill Land Grant Act (August 30, 1890). Alumni biographical details sourced from institutional records and contemporaneous published sources.