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1804
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Lemuel Haynes receives an honorary master’s degree from Middlebury
College in Vermont
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1823
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Alexander Twilight earns a bachelor’s degree
from Middlebury
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1837
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Cheney State Training School in Pennsylvania is founded as the first
major black college or university
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1849
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Charles Reason becomes the first African American professor at a
predominantly white university, teaching French, Greek, Latin, and
mathematics at New York Central College
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1850
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Lucy Stanton Sessions becomes the first
African American woman to complete a collegiate course of study, at Oberlin
College in Ohio
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1862
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Mary Jane Patterson is the first African American woman to receive a
bachelor’s degree, from Oberlin College
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1865–1869
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Several major black colleges and universities are founded: Shaw
University (SC), Atlanta University (GA), Virginia Union University (VA),
Bowie State College (MD), Fisk University (TN), Howard University (DC),
Hampton Institute (VA), Clark College (GA)
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1874
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Edward Alexander Bouchet becomes the first African American inducted
into the Phi Beta Kappa academic honor society; in 1876, he becomes the
first African American to receive a doctorate degree (in physics, from Yale
University)
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1895
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W.E.B. Du Bois earns a doctorate degree from
Harvard University; the next year, Harvard Historical Studies publishes Du
Bois’s dissertation, Suppression of the African Slave Trade
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1904
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Mary McLeod Bethune establishes the Daytona
Normal and Industrial School in Florida, later renamed Bethune-Cookman
College
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1906
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John Hope becomes the first African American president of a
university, at Morehouse College in Georgia
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1907
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Alain Locke becomes the first African American
Rhodes Scholar
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1915
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Historian Carter G. Woodson establishes the
Association for the Study of Negro Life and History and edits the Journal of
Negro History, which first appears in 1916
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1921
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Several African American women earn doctorate degrees from U.S.
institutions: Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander (University of Pennsylvania,
economics); Eva Dykes (Radcliffe College, English); Georgiana Simpson
(University of Chicago, German)
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1922
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Lucy Diggs Stowe, cofounder of the African American sorority Alpha
Kappa Alpha, serves as dean of women at Howard University in Washington,
D.C.
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1926
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Mordecai W. Johnson becomes the first African American president of
Howard University
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1943
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Frederick Douglass Patterson, president of the Tuskegee Institute,
establishes the United Negro College Fund to provide
financial support to black students who wish to attend college
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1962
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Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett attempts to prevent James
Meredith from becoming the first black student at the
University of Mississippi, but the U.S. Supreme Court rules in Meredith’s
favor, and he enrolls amid rioting
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1963
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Alabama governor George Wallace physically bars
Vivian Malone and James Hood from registering at the University of Alabama;
ultimately, the National Guard is called in to accompany the two students to
enrollment
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1968–1969
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African American students wage protests to demand changes in
curriculum, admissions, and hiring of black faculty on several college
campuses, including Brandeis University, Trinity College, Columbia
University, Ohio State University, and Cornell University
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1987
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Scholar and critic Henry Louis Gates Jr. publishes Figures in Black, a seminal work that sets forth his
theories about the interpretation of black literature; the next
year, he articulates these theories further in The Signifying Monkey
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African Americans in Education
