Morehouse College: The House That Made Men

In the spring of eighteen sixty-seven, just two years after the end of the Civil War, a Baptist minister named William Jefferson White opened a school for Black men in the basement of Springfield Baptist Church in Augusta, Georgia. He called it the Augusta Institute. His students were former enslaved people and the sons of freedmen, many of whom had been forbidden by law from learning to read. White intended to train preachers and teachers, people who could go back into their communities and lift others up.

The school moved to Atlanta in eighteen seventy-nine and eventually took the name Morehouse College, honoring a northern Baptist minister named Henry Lyman Morehouse who had championed education for freed Black Americans. The name stuck, and so did the institution's mission: a private, historically Black, all-male liberal arts college committed to producing leaders.

No school has done it more consistently. From this campus came Martin Luther King Jr., who entered Morehouse at fifteen years old and graduated in nineteen forty-eight. His mentor was the college's sixth president, Benjamin Elijah Mays, a theologian and public intellectual who modeled what principled leadership looked like and delivered the eulogy at King's funeral in nineteen sixty-eight. Their relationship defined what Morehouse calls the Morehouse Man ideal.

The roster runs deep. Maynard Jackson, the first Black mayor of Atlanta. Julian Bond, civil rights leader and NAACP chairman. Spike Lee, the filmmaker. Samuel L. Jackson, who was actually suspended from the college in nineteen sixty-nine for taking part in a protest that held the board of trustees captive. He graduated later and has since donated millions to the school.

Today Morehouse enrolls around twenty-three hundred students. It remains an anchor of the Atlanta University Center, the largest consortium of historically Black colleges and universities in the world. The college that started in a church basement has sent more than six thousand men on to earn doctoral degrees.