Voorhees University

History

Voorhees University was founded on April 14, 1897, by Elizabeth Evelyn Wright, a recent graduate of Tuskegee Institute who had been mentored personally by Booker T. Washington. Wright opened the Denmark Industrial School in rural Bamberg County, South Carolina, with fourteen students and two teachers — herself among them. The choice of Denmark was strategic: a rural, majority-Black part of South Carolina that had no institution capable of preparing Black children for anything beyond agricultural labor.

In 1902, New Jersey philanthropist Ralph Voorhees donated $5,000 to acquire land and construct permanent buildings — a contribution acknowledged in the institution's renaming as the Voorhees Industrial School. The school was modeled explicitly on the Tuskegee curriculum: vocational instruction paired with academic foundations, taught by Black faculty for Black students in a self-governing institutional culture.

In 1924, Voorhees became affiliated with the Episcopal Church, a relationship it has maintained ever since. The institution evolved across the twentieth century from industrial school to junior college (1947) to four-year college (1962), at which point it received full SACSCOC accreditation — the first HBCU in South Carolina to do so. It assumed university status in 2022.

Elizabeth Evelyn Wright died in 1906, only nine years after founding the institution. She is buried on the Voorhees campus. The college that became a university was, in every meaningful sense, her creation.

Notable Alumni

A representative selection from a small institution whose graduates have shaped southern Black political life, professional sports, and architectural practice in the American West.

Significance

Voorhees occupies a singular place in HBCU history as the first institution founded by an African American woman. That fact alone is consequential. The Reconstruction- and Jim Crow-era HBCU movement was overwhelmingly led by white missionary societies and Black male clergy. Elizabeth Evelyn Wright's institutional founding, executed in her twenties from a base of zero capital and no infrastructure, broke that pattern at a moment when few avenues for institutional leadership were available to Black women.

The institution's location matters as well. Rural Bamberg County, South Carolina, remains one of the most economically distressed regions in the South. Voorhees has functioned for more than a century as the primary engine of educational mobility for the surrounding community — an anchor institution in a place that has very few.

Voorhees's path—industrial school to junior college to liberal arts college to university—mirrors the broader institutional trajectory of the small private HBCU sector. Its survival into the 2020s, at small scale and on modest resources, is a measure of the durability of the founding generation's institutional choices. Under Dr. Ronnie Hopkins, its tenth president, Voorhees was ranked #65 among Regional Colleges South in the 2026 U.S. News & World Report edition, sustaining an enrollment of roughly 440 students. In 2026, Hopkins was named University President of the Year by Education Insider Magazine, a recognition tied to the institution's expanded academic offerings, strengthened enrollment, and growth in philanthropic support. In May 2026 the university conferred degrees on 139 graduates, its largest commencement class in more than a decade and one that included an unprecedented number of STEM graduates admitted to medical school; the United Negro College Fund's president and chief executive, Dr. Michael L. Lomax, delivered the commencement address.