Shaw University

Shaw University in Raleigh holds a singular distinction: it is the oldest historically Black university in the American South, founded in eighteen sixty-five just months after the Civil War ended. The Reverend Henry Martin Tupper, a Baptist missionary from Massachusetts, arrived in Raleigh with almost no resources and began teaching formerly enslaved people in a single rented room. Within two decades the school had a campus and a medical department, and by eighteen eighty-eight a law school, one of the first in the country to train Black lawyers.

Shaw also opened Estey Hall in eighteen seventy-three, the first building in the United States constructed specifically to provide higher education for Black women. More than a century and a half later, the university still sits in downtown Raleigh, a quiet anchor of that history amid the state capital.