Cheyney University of Pennsylvania

Overview

Cheyney University of Pennsylvania is a public historically Black university in Cheyney, Pennsylvania, founded in 1837 as the Institute for Colored Youth — the oldest historically Black college or university in the United States. Its predecessor, the African Institute, was established in Philadelphia in February 1837 by Richard Humphreys, a Quaker philanthropist born on a plantation on Tortola in the British West Indies. Humphreys bequeathed $10,000, one-tenth of his estate, to found a school to educate people of African descent and train them as teachers, after being moved by news of an 1829 race riot against free African Americans in Cincinnati. He charged thirteen fellow Quakers with designing an institution to instruct “the descendants of the African Race in school learning, in the various branches of the mechanic Arts, trades and Agriculture.”

Relocation and a Civil Rights Lawsuit

In 1902, the prominent Cheney family donated land 25 miles west of Philadelphia that let the school relocate to George Cheyney’s farm, and the name Cheyney became associated with the institution by 1913; it joined Pennsylvania’s State System of Higher Education as Cheyney University in 1983. In 1980, Cheyney was part of a civil rights lawsuit alleging the state had unlawfully underfunded it as a historically Black university — a case that took nineteen years to settle, finally resolving in 1999.