New York Central College: America's First Integrated Campus

On the rolling farmland of Cortland County, in a village then called McGrawville, a small Baptist college opened its doors in September of eighteen forty-nine. What made New York Central College extraordinary, in a nation where slavery was still legal and segregation was the norm in nearly every institution, was the thing its founders took as an obvious given: any qualified student, regardless of race or sex, was welcome to attend, and to sit side by side in the same classroom.

The college was founded by Cyrus Pitt Grosvenor and his circle of radical anti-slavery Baptists, who called their guiding principles "Radical Anti-Slavery and Equality of the Sexes." Those were not marketing slogans. They were enforced from opening day.

On that first day of classes, the faculty included Charles L. Reason, a New York-born Black scholar who taught Greek, Latin, French, and mathematics. Reason delivered the inaugural address, speaking on the harmony of the college's principles with human destiny. He was not a token hire. He was the most qualified applicant. He became the first Black professor at any predominantly white college in the United States.

Other Black faculty followed. William G. Allen taught Greek, German, and rhetoric. Grace Mapps graduated there in eighteen fifty-two. The student body mixed races and sexes at a time when most American colleges admitted neither Black students nor women.

The college lasted only eleven years. Financial pressures mounted through the eighteen fifties, enrollment remained thin, and a smallpox outbreak in the village around eighteen sixty helped seal its fate. The last classes concluded around eighteen sixty.

But the precedent New York Central College set mattered enormously. It proved that integrated, coeducational higher education was possible in America, decades before other institutions would accept those principles. Its graduates and faculty carried those ideas into the antislavery and women's rights movements. Smithsonian collections today hold documentary records of what happened here, on this quiet patch of upstate New York, when a handful of Baptists decided that education without equality was no education at all.