Dillard University, Louisiana's Oldest HBCU

Dillard University is Louisiana's oldest historically Black college and university, and it grew from two separate schools born in the same year. In eighteen sixty-eight, the American Missionary Association, a Congregational body, founded Straight University to educate freed Black Louisianans, and the Methodist Episcopal Church established the Union Normal School, which became New Orleans University. For sixty years the two institutions operated separately, both committed to education regardless of race.

In nineteen thirty they merged to form Dillard University, named for James Hardy Dillard, a white Southern educator who spent his career advocating for African American schooling. The campus opened in nineteen thirty-five with a unified architectural plan on a wooded tract in Gentilly. Today Dillard remains a private liberal arts university serving New Orleans.