Morehouse College

Overview

Morehouse College is a private, historically Black men’s liberal arts college in Atlanta, Georgia, and a member of the Atlanta University Center consortium alongside Spelman College, Clark Atlanta University, Morris Brown College, and the Morehouse School of Medicine. It is the largest men’s liberal arts college in the United States, and its alumni include 11 Fulbright Scholars, six Rhodes Scholars, and five Marshall Scholars, along with civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. and filmmaker Spike Lee.

Founding in the Aftermath of the Civil War

The college traces its origins to the Augusta Institute, founded in 1867 — two years after the Civil War’s end — by William Jefferson White, an Atlanta Baptist minister and cabinetmaker, with the support of the Rev. Richard C. Coulter, a former slave, and the Rev. Edmund Turney, organizer of the National Theological Institute for educating freedmen in Washington, D.C. The institute was founded at Springfield Baptist Church in Augusta, Georgia, the oldest independent Black church in the United States, to educate African-American men in theology and other subjects previously denied to them under slavery.

Growth and Civil Rights Legacy

Growth through the late 19th and early 20th centuries strengthened the school’s finances and enrollment and shifted its focus toward the liberal arts. The college went on to play a key role in the development of the civil rights movement and the pursuit of racial equality in the United States, graduating numerous “African-American firsts” in local, state, and federal government as well as in science, academia, business, and entertainment.