Today, we know that the first HBCU, Pennsylvania’s Cheyney University, opened in 1837. But just a few years earlier, this HBCU was shuttered before its doors even opened.
In 1831, a group of Black leaders and white abolitionists was building the country's first college for Black men. They had secured $1,000 in funding and found a building in New Haven, Connecticut. But just when they were about to cross the finish line, things came to a screeching, racist halt.
In September 1831, 700 white men — many of them alumni of New Haven's Ivy League school, Yale — stopped the dream in its tracks by voting against it. In the following weeks, enraged whites stormed New Haven’s streets and attacked innocent Black folks, while newspapers nationwide hailed the decision. Why?
Two words: Nat Turner. Word had just reached New Haven that the previous August, Turner's uprising in Southampton County, Virginia, had killed dozens of whites before the rebellion was crushed, and Turner himself was hanged. Today, the site where the first HBCU would've stood on New Haven’s Water Street is under a highway.
Let anti-Black narratives tell it, our people are lazy and passive, but we know that's NEVER been true. We've always been committed to doing what's necessary to build our own. Even when they knock it down, we keep rebuilding. Let's keep that same energy, especially right now.