Coppin State University

Overview

Coppin State University is a public historically Black university in Baltimore, part of the University System of Maryland, founded in 1900 as a one-year teacher-training course at what was then Colored High School (later Douglass High School) on Pennsylvania Avenue. By 1902 it had expanded into a two-year Normal Department within the high school, and was given its own principal seven years later. In 1926 the program was named the Fanny Jackson Coppin Normal School, honoring the pioneering African-American teacher-educator Fanny Jackson Coppin; by 1938 its curriculum had been lengthened to four years, it gained authority to grant the Bachelor of Science degree, and it was renamed Coppin Teachers College. Maryland’s State Department of Education absorbed the school in 1950 as Coppin State Teachers College, and in 1952 it moved to its present 38-acre site on West North Avenue.

From Teachers College to University

In 1963 the Board of Trustees expanded the school’s degree-granting authority beyond teacher education, and it was renamed Coppin State College; the first Bachelor of Arts degree was conferred in 1967. Coppin joined the newly organized University of Maryland System in 1988, and took its present name, Coppin State University, on April 13, 2004.