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5 Black Colleges That Changed America

#1 Howard University

Motto: Veritas et Utilitas (Truth and Service)

This private, federally chartered university in Washington, D.C. was founded shortly after the Civil War, when members of the first Congregational Society of Washington established a university for the education of African American men. The university took its name from General Oliver O. Howard, a Civil War hero and commissioner of the Freedman’s Bureau. Since 1926, the university has received an annual federal appropriation for development, construction and improvement. The late Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, Nobel Laureate and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Toni Morrison, and civil rights leader and former UN Ambassador Andrew Young are among the university’s distinguished alumni. Its library is the leading research library on African American history.

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