Spelman College

History

Spelman College was founded on April 11, 1881, by Sophia B. Packard and Harriet E. Giles, two New England missionaries who arrived in Atlanta with $100 in contributions from the First Baptist Church of Medford, Massachusetts. They began with eleven students in the basement of Friendship Baptist Church — a basement that had been used as a station on the Underground Railroad.

The institution was initially called the Atlanta Baptist Female Seminary. In 1884, John D. Rockefeller, whose wife was a member of the Packard family's extended social network, donated funds for a permanent campus building. The college was renamed Spelman Seminary in 1884 in honor of Lucy Henry Spelman, Rockefeller's mother-in-law — one of the most significant philanthropic gifts to Black education of the nineteenth century.

The institution achieved college status in 1924 and was renamed Spelman College. It joined the Atlanta University Center Consortium — with Morehouse College, Clark Atlanta University, Morehouse School of Medicine, and several other institutions — which allows cross-registration, shared library resources, and the cultivation of the most concentrated cluster of Black higher education in the world.

In 1987, Johnetta B. Cole became the first Black woman to serve as Spelman's president — a milestone that received significant national attention and further elevated the college's profile as a center of Black women's intellectual and civic life.

In June 2026, the Board of Trustees named Dr. Ayanna Howard — a roboticist, artificial-intelligence researcher, and former NASA engineer who had served as dean of the College of Engineering at The Ohio State University — the college's twelfth president. She took office on August 1, 2026, succeeding interim president Rosalind "Roz" Brewer, a Spelman alumna who had led the college following the departure of Helene Gayle in late 2024. Howard's selection placed a nationally prominent technologist at the head of an institution that enrolls roughly 2,700 students and is consistently ranked the top historically Black college in the United States. In August 2026 the college welcomed its Class of 2030, selected from a pool of more than 13,500 applicants. In September 2026 U.S. News & World Report again named Spelman the nation's No. 1 historically Black college in its 2027 Best Colleges rankings — a twentieth consecutive year atop the HBCU list, a streak spanning every edition since the magazine introduced the ranking — while placing Spelman No. 34 among national liberal arts colleges, up three spots, and No. 2 nationally for social mobility.

Notable Alumni

Source notes: This entry draws from: Beverly Guy-Sheftall and Jo Moore Stewart, Spelman: A Centennial Celebration (1981); institutional records held in the Spelman College Archives; and SACSCOC accreditation records. Notable alumni biographical details sourced from contemporaneous published sources and respective institutional records.