Spelman College

Overview

Spelman College is a private, historically Black women’s liberal arts college in Atlanta, Georgia, and a founding member of the Atlanta University Center consortium. Founded in 1881 as the Atlanta Baptist Female Seminary, it awarded its first college degrees in 1901 and is the oldest private historically Black liberal arts institution for women in the United States.

Founding in a Church Basement

The school was established on April 11, 1881, in the basement of Friendship Baptist Church in Atlanta by two teachers from the Oread Institute in Worcester, Massachusetts, Harriet E. Giles and Sophia B. Packard, who traveled to Atlanta specifically to start a school for Black freedwomen with the support of Friendship Baptist’s pastor, Frank Quarles. They began with 11 African-American women and $100 from the First Baptist Church in Medford, Massachusetts, plus a promise of further support from the Woman’s American Baptist Home Mission Society. Though most of their first students were illiterate, the founders envisioned a full liberal arts curriculum from the start — the school’s first circular listed subjects including algebra, Latin, rhetoric, geometry, astronomy, and “evidences of Christianity.” By the end of the first term, enrollment had grown to 80 students.

The Rockefeller Connection

In 1884, John D. Rockefeller visited the school, by then grown to 600 students and 16 faculty members, and was impressed enough to settle the debt on its property. His wife, Laura Spelman Rockefeller, her sister Lucy Spelman, and their parents Harvey Buel and Lucy Henry Spelman — longtime activists in the abolitionist movement — also supported the school, and in 1884 it was renamed Spelman Seminary in their honor. Rockefeller donated the funds for the campus’s oldest building, Rockefeller Hall, built in 1886.