HOWARD UNIVERSITY

Howard University was founded in 1867 by an act of Congress and was named for General Oliver Otis Howard, former head of the Freedmen's Bureau. Howard's leadership was exclusively white until 1926, when Reverend Mordecai Johnson became its first black president. Virtually coinciding with Johnson's arrival was a pledge by Congress to provide an annual appropriation to support the university's endowment. Congress's financial support allowed Johnson to implement his plan to improve the academic quality of the school. (When Johnson arrived, only the medical and dental schools—out of ten professional and graduate schools—were accredited.) Johnson made his first move with the law school. He hired Charles Houston as the new dean and gave him the mandate to secure accreditation. Houston, who would become the first legal counsel for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and one of the architects of the NAACP's civil rights legal strategies, hired William Hastie and James Nabrit, among others. In 1931, Howard's law school was accredited and, more importantly, became nationally recognized for its leadership in civil rights law. Civil rights pioneers Thurgood Marshall and Robert Carter graduated in 1933 and 1940, respectively. Furthermore, Nabrit, who participated in virtually every civil rights brief from 1927 to 1954, created the nation's first civil rights law class in 1938.

Howard's academic prominence was not limited to the law school. Scientists like zoologist Ernest Everet Just, chemist Percy Julian, anthropologist Montague Cobb, and the medical school's Charles Drew were all leaders in their disciplines. Alain Locke, whose anthology The New Negro gave form to the Harlem Renaissance, taught philosophy at Howard. Poet and literary critic Sterling Brown was also on the faculty, as were pioneering historians Charles H. Wesley and Rayford Logan, actor Todd Duncan, economist Abram Harris, political scientist Ralph Bunche, sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, and education specialists Dorothy Porter Wesley, Charles Thompson, and Doxey Wilkerson.

Many leading education philanthropists added to the government's support, thus providing financial security for Howard throughout the Great Depression. With its concentration of academic talent, Johnson's accreditation and building campaign, and secure finances, Howard was the most successful black academic center in the country. Fisk University in Tennessee and Atlanta University in Georgia were Howard's only competitors, but their resources paled in comparison.

This privileged position, however, did not translate into a peaceful existence. During the 1930s Howard undergraduates led marches against segregation in the House of Representatives' dining room, protested a national crime conference that ignored lynching, held peace rallies, and helped lead economic boycotts of local white merchants who refused to hire black workers. Faculty members arranged conferences that attacked New Deal policies, led community pickets, and organized a teachers' union that aligned itself with national labor causes and protested local segregation policies. Even Mordecai Johnson's actions occasionally inspired calls for his ouster: Because he thought the economic experiment in the Soviet Union was worth further study and because he defended the freedom of speech of even his most radical faculty, several congressmen were convinced that Johnson was a Communist, that he supported Communist teachings on campus, and that he harbored Communists. Federal investigations into Howard's affairs and teaching practices, however, failed to turn up sufficient evidence to fire Johnson or end financial support for the university.

When Howard attained academic excellence in the late 1920s it became the seed ground for several generations of intellectual and political activists. Although its popularity among federal officials was not unanimous during the Depression, it enjoyed public support from such prominent figures as Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes. This support continued even despite strong faculty criticism of the New Deal. It is likely that Roosevelt believed that the symbolic importance of a national Negro university far outweighed the significance of any critiques that came from its campus.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Dyson, Walter. Howard University, the Capstone of Negro Education, a History: 1867–1940. 1941.

Holloway, Jonathan Scott. Confronting the Veil: Abram Harris Jr., E. Franklin Frazier, and Ralph Bunche, 1919–1941. 2002.

Logan, Rayford. Howard University: The First Hundred Years, 1867–1967. 1967.

Manning, Kenneth R. Black Apollo of Science: The Life of Ernest Everett Just. 1983.

McNeil, Genna Rae. Groundwork: Charles Hamilton Houston and the Struggle for Civil Rights. 1983.

Winston, Michael R. "Through the Back Door: Academic Racism and the Negro Scholar in Historical Perspective." Daedelus 100, no. 3 (1971): 678–719.