Waverly: The HBCU Neighborhood

The neighborhood east of downtown Columbia called Waverly has a layered history that the surface doesn't immediately reveal. It began as a suburb developed in the eighteen sixties, originally for white residents with enough wealth to buy out of the crowded city center. The community was annexed into Columbia in nineteen thirteen.

What transformed Waverly was education. Two historically Black colleges, Benedict College and Allen University, were established adjacent to this neighborhood in eighteen seventy, both in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War.

Benedict College was founded on a former one-hundred-and-ten-acre plantation by Bathsheba A. Benedict, a woman from Pawtucket, Rhode Island, who donated thirteen thousand dollars to purchase the property. The first class, ten freedmen, met in December of eighteen seventy in a building that had been the enslaver's house. Allen University was founded that same year by the African Methodist Episcopal Church of South Carolina to educate newly freed people and train clergy. It moved from Cokesbury to Columbia in eighteen eighty.

As white residents moved away from Waverly through the early twentieth century, African American professionals, artisans, teachers, ministers, and doctors moved in. By the nineteen thirties the neighborhood was almost entirely Black. It became one of the most significant Black middle-class communities in the South, home to dozens of churches, businesses, and civic institutions.

Several of those businesses were listed in the Negro Motorist Green Book, the annual travel guide that Black Americans relied on to find safe lodging, restaurants, and service stations during the era of legal segregation. Being in the Green Book meant a business would not humiliate or endanger you when you walked through the door.

The Waverly Historic District was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen eighty-nine and was added to the African American Civil Rights Network in February of twenty twenty-one.