Shaw University and the HBCU Infrastructure of Justice

Henry Martin Tupper was a Massachusetts minister who arrived in Raleigh in eighteen sixty-five, the year the Civil War ended. He began holding classes for freedpeople in a single room. What grew from that room became Shaw University, chartered in eighteen seventy-five and recognized as the oldest historically Black university in the South.

Shaw's early history was shaped by an unusual ambition. In eighteen eighty-one, Shaw opened the Leonard Medical School, a four-year program that was the first medical school for Black students in the United States to require a four-year curriculum. It trained physicians for a region where Black patients were routinely turned away from white hospitals and where Black physicians were the only medical care available to millions of people. The Leonard Medical School operated until nineteen eighteen, when the costly new standards set by the Flexner Report on medical education, a reform that fell with particular force on Black medical schools, forced it to close. The loss of that institution is not well acknowledged in medical history.

Shaw graduates went on to shape what the twentieth century became. Ella Baker, valedictorian of the class of nineteen twenty-seven, organized the conference that founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Shaw's own chapel thirty-three years after she left. The campus where Baker came of age was the campus where the next generation of the movement launched.

St. Augustine's University, founded in eighteen sixty-seven by the Episcopal Church two miles north, and North Carolina Central University, founded in nineteen ten by James Shepard in Durham, completed a cluster of historically Black institutions within a few miles of each other that trained teachers, lawyers, ministers, physicians, and civil rights organizers across the entire twentieth century. That cluster is rarely discussed as the infrastructure it was.