Black Women in Higher Education
Authors: Williams Hettie 
Published: March 2023

Black women have strived to secure higher education in the United States for more than two centuries. These attempts began before the Civil War and continue to the present. In the process, African American women have earned certificates, bachelors degrees, and various graduate degrees as well as having become college administrators, presidents, and founders of institutions of higher education. Historian Stephanie Y. Evans has noted that those, such as Prudence Crandall, who initially sought to educate Black women in the nineteenth century often faced violence not just in the South but in the North as well. Black women persisted and began to secure higher education degrees in the early decades of the nineteenth century, many times facing daunting challenges. A vast majority of these women secured their degrees in the North in states such as Ohio and primarily at institutions such as Oberlin, Antioch, and Wilberforce. Several Black women obtained a literary degree (L.D.) from Oberlin before the Civil War, making it the leading institution to award Black women higher education degrees or certificates in Antebellum America. Lucy Ann Stanton is likely the first Black woman to obtain such a degree from Oberlin in 1850. Sarah Jane Early attended Oberlin at about this same time and received a degree in classical studies in 1856 from the institution. Early also became the first Black woman college instructor in US history when she was hired to teach as an instructor at Wilberforce University in 1858. Both Stanton and Early are among the twelve Black women who received degrees from Oberlin before 1860. While Stanton is regarded by most to be the first Black woman to receive a certificate from an institute of higher education in the United States, Mary Jane Patterson was the first Black woman to obtain a BA degree, which she earned from Oberlin in 1862. Stanton received what was known as a literary degree not a bachelors degree and thus is not considered to be the first Black woman to receive a BA degree from a four-year college. It is only known that early received “a degree” in classical studies that was likely not a BA according to records available. Two years later, Rebecca Lee graduated from the New England Female Medical College in 1864. Lee is the first known Black woman to secure a medical degree in the United States. At least a dozen Black women obtained their degrees from southern colleges before 1865 as well. By 1865, three notable Black women educators had secured BA degrees from Oberlin including Patterson, Fanny Marion Jackson Coppin, and Frances Josephine Norris. Patterson and Coppin went on to teach at the Institute for Colored Youth in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, which was one of the first high schools for African Americans in the United States and eventually became Cheyney University. The nineteenth century was a formative time of development for Black women in education. These women played pivotal roles in building Black educational institutions; Oberlin and Wilberforce were proving grounds in that several Black women who secured their degrees from these institutions went on to become educators and founders of schools as well as civil rights advocates more broadly. We see this in the cases of Patterson and Coppin. After she graduated from Oberlin, Patterson taught at the Institute for Colored Youth for five years. She later went on to teach in Washington, DC at the Preparatory High School for Colored Youth (M Street School, which later became known as Paul Laurence Dunbar High School), where she also served as principal. During her term as principal, Patterson made the school one of the more prestigious high schools for African Americans in the nation. Coppin, born into slavery, was a self-made woman. She worked to secure an education first at the Rhode Island State Normal School, then at Oberlin. She became principal at the Institute of Colored Youth and expanded the curriculum significantly making it one of the more notable schools for African Americans in the region and nation. Her expansion included the creation of a Women’s Industrial Exchange and Industrial Department. Coppin State University, located in Baltimore, Maryland, is named for Fannie Jackson Coppin. By demanding access to education, Black women were at the forefront of the struggle for Black equality through the twentieth century. The quest for a quality education was considered by African Americans to be a major civil rights issue through the twentieth century. It was in the early decades of the twentieth century that Black woman began to secure graduate degrees in larger numbers. In this history, women such as Marion Thompson Wright, Constance Baker Motley, and Autherine Lucy led the way in demanding equal access to educational facilities across the nation. For many Black Americans, the acquisition of a higher education was seen as a pathway to citizenship and freedom. The vast majority of the scholarly literature on Black Americans in higher education has focused primarily on Black men. But, more recently, scholars have begun to focus specifically on the role of Black women in higher education. This field is defined by intellectual biographies, social histories of pivotal institutions such as Oberlin and Spelman, and edited volumes that contain interviews and personal narratives, as well as some key autobiographies of women who participated in key moments in the history of Black women in higher education. Some reoccurring themes in this history include race consciousness, gender equity, and class awareness. This essay is divided into two parts. The first part contains a brief discussion and list of general overviews, critical biographies, edited volumes, and journals, with the second part focusing on the major historical eras in the African American experience in relation to Black women and higher education. These major moments in African American life include the long nineteenth century, the New Negro Era, the World War II Era into the 1950s, the Civil Rights Era, and the Post-Civil Rights Era. A topical-chronological approach primarily defines this analysis because this allows for one to more succinctly get a sense of the historiography of the topic as a whole. Black women’s history is still a relatively new field and much of the work on Black women in higher education is to be found in biographies, survey histories of a particular era, and edited volumes, with few monographs on the subject. The history of Black women in higher education has only recently become a subfield in historical studies. It is only in the recent past that a few survey and monograph studies have begun to appear on Black women and higher education that have helped to move the historiography of this subject forward beyond contributionist histories, biographies, and edited volumes.