Lincoln University, Founded by Black Soldiers

You are passing Lincoln University in Jefferson City, a historically Black university with one of the most remarkable founding stories in American higher education. It was not built by a benefactor, a church, or a state legislature. It was built by soldiers who had just finished fighting for the country that had enslaved their families, and they paid for it themselves.

At the end of the Civil War, the men of the Sixty-Second and Sixty-Fifth United States Colored Infantry, made up largely of Missourians, faced a question every returning soldier faces: what comes next? The men of the Sixty-Second had a specific answer. They wanted a school. Not just any school, but one explicitly for the education of African Americans, located in Missouri, combining classical and vocational training.

Soldiers whose monthly pay averaged thirteen dollars pooled five thousand dollars from the Sixty-Second Infantry alone, supplemented by an additional fourteen hundred dollars from the Sixty-Fifth, and formally established Lincoln Institute on January fourteenth, eighteen sixty-six. Their former officer, First Lieutenant Richard Baxter Foster, became its first principal. The school opened that September in a rented building in Jefferson City.

The founding was extraordinary in American history. Lincoln University is among the few Black colleges established by African American members of the United States Army, out of their own pockets, with their own deliberate organizing, before any state funding existed and before most of them had had access to formal education themselves.

The institution grew steadily, became a full university, and today remains a public institution and a member of the Historically Black Colleges and Universities network. Its alumni have served in law, medicine, politics, and the military. The building where it stands in Jefferson City is a short drive from the Missouri State Capitol, a proximity that carries its own meaning: the men who built this university did so in the same city where Missouri's legislators had once passed laws forbidding the education of Black people.