How HBCUs Create and Preserve Their Own History Through Amazing Artifacts

By: Kaila Philo

Smithsonian Magazine

In February 1837, the African Institute was established in Cheyney, Pennsylvania, at the bequest of Quaker philanthropist Richard Humphreys. He had designated $10,000, a tenth of his estate, “to instruct the descendants of the African race in school learning, in the various branches of the mechanic arts, trades and agriculture, in order to prepare and fit and qualify them to act as teachers.”

Today, the school is called Cheyney University, the first of what would later be known as historically Black colleges and universities, or HBCUs. According to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), from the 1860s to 1900, more than 90 of these institutions were established—including Shaw University, the first to be founded after the Civil War. The Higher Education Act of 1965 noted that HBCUs “have contributed significantly to the effort to attain equal opportunity through postsecondary education for Black, low-income and educationally disadvantaged Americans.”

Now the museum is telling the stories of these schools with a new exhibition, “At the Vanguard: Making and Saving History at HBCUs,” which celebrates the many contributions of the institutions to American life. “At the Vanguard” features a collection of objects culled from the museum’s partnerships with five historically Black universities: Clark Atlanta, Florida A&M, Jackson State, Texas Southern and Tuskegee.

Four bricks handmade by Tuskegee University students illustrate the very material that composed the campus. “Many of the buildings were created by students,” says Deborah Tulani Salahu-Din, a researcher in Black American literary history who helped curate the exhibition. “They took classes in brickmaking and then they made the bricks and used them in the construction of many of the buildings on campus.” Some students were even able to help build the school in lieu of paying tuition.

Other artifacts on view include an oil painting by American artist William H. Johnson, lent by the Clark Atlanta University Art Museum, and a mixed-media sculpture by contemporary Cameroonian artist Franck Kemkeng Noah, lent by the University Museum at Texas Southern.

“HBCUs played the role in providing platforms and showcasing works that would otherwise just go neglected,” Salahu-Din says.

“At the Vanguard” also features objects from famous figures in Black American history, such as George Washington Carver’s typewritten notes about peanut oil and a rare 1942 printing of For My People by poet Margaret Walker, from Tuskegee and Jackson State Universities, respectively.

Walker was an English scholar at Jackson State, where she founded the Institute for the Study of the History, Life and Culture of Black People in 1968. She also organized a festival that brought Black women writers together from across the country to showcase their work and commune over the craft.

In “collecting Black material culture and their own institutional histories,” NMAAHC African diaspora curator Joanne T. Hyppolite says, HBCUs have done “incredible work.” It’s “something they’ve been doing since the late 1800s, at a time when other museums and archives didn’t see the value of the content in that history and safeguarding it so that other people can use it in the future.”

Painter Hale Woodruff established the first permanent fine arts program at a Southern HBCU, at Clark Atlanta University, and in the 1940s, persuaded the school to create an annual juried art competition. Much like Walker, he used his position as HBCU faculty to prop up other Black creatives in an otherwise stifling political and social climate.

“HBCUs saw the value of Black cultural production and Black aesthetics in ways that other audiences probably didn’t understand,” Hyppolite says. “They encouraged students to look at their communities, their landscapes, their families, and paint from that, from what they know and what they saw. And in doing so, they created this incredible repository of Black life and Black history.”