Howard University and the Architecture of Black Washington

In the years immediately after the Civil War, Washington became the destination for an extraordinary concentration of Black intellectual and professional life, and the institution at the center of it was built on a hill in the neighborhood then called Howardstown. Howard University received its federal charter on March second, eighteen sixty-seven, named for General Oliver Otis Howard, the commissioner of the Freedmen's Bureau, who helped organize its founding and served as its third president. It opened with a faculty that was integrated and a student body that was almost entirely Black, training teachers, ministers, lawyers, and doctors for a country that would not let them attend most other universities.

The law school produced Thurgood Marshall, class of nineteen thirty-three, who would argue Brown versus the Board of Education before the Supreme Court in nineteen fifty-two and again in nineteen fifty-three and be appointed to that court in nineteen sixty-seven. The medical school, Freedmen's Hospital adjacent to campus, trained the majority of Black physicians in America for most of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, at a time when Black doctors were denied training at white hospitals throughout the South and in much of the North.

The intellectual culture Howard generated was not confined to campus. The neighborhood that surrounded it, the Seventh Street corridor, the Shaw neighborhood named for Colonel Robert Gould Shaw of the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts, became the densest concentration of Black professional and cultural life in the country outside of Harlem. Black-owned banks, newspapers, law offices, insurance companies, and hotels occupied blocks that white Washington pretended did not exist.

The poet Sterling Brown taught at Howard for forty years. Zora Neale Hurston studied there for several years before transferring to Barnard. E. Franklin Frazier, the sociologist who wrote the foundational analysis of the Black middle class, spent his career there. The building they worked in still stands.