Southern University and the First HBCU System

Southern University and Agricultural and Mechanical College sits on the bluffs north of downtown Baton Rouge, occupying a site with a long view of the Mississippi River. The university was chartered by the Louisiana General Assembly in April of eighteen eighty, as Southern University for Colored Students, and held its first classes in New Orleans in March of eighteen eighty-one. Twelve students met in a former synagogue on Calliope Street. That was the beginning.

The institution moved to Baton Rouge in nineteen fourteen and grew into something the founders in that New Orleans synagogue could not have imagined: the largest historically Black university in the United States. Between nineteen seventy and nineteen ninety, enrollment consistently exceeded ten thousand students. Southern became the only HBCU to have grown into a full multi-campus university system, with branches in New Orleans and Shreveport.

The university also carries one of the more painful chapters in the history of American higher education. In November of nineteen seventy-two, during student protests demanding greater voice in university governance, two students were shot and killed outside the Old Auditorium on campus. Their names were Denver Smith and Leonard Brown. They were shot with buckshot. Both the governor's office and the East Baton Rouge sheriff's department denied responsibility. The deaths have never been solved.

The Old Auditorium is now the Southern University Museum of Art. A marker on campus identifies the site. The university enrolls tens of thousands of students across its system and remains one of the central institutions of Black academic and professional life in the South.

Note: The nineteen seventy-two deaths remain officially unsolved. The question of which law enforcement agency fired the fatal shots has not been resolved in the public record.