On Origin of Howard University

(Letter)

19 January 2009

Dear Comrades:

In the otherwise fine article in WV No. 925 (21 November 2008), entitled “Communist Organizing in the Jim Crow South: What’s Not in The Great Debaters,” we say:

“Nonetheless, black colleges such as Wiley, Morehouse and Howard University were founded by church institutions to primarily train clergy and teachers, the core of the black petty bourgeoisie.”

Howard University was founded in 1867, two years after the end of the Civil War, which abolished black chattel slavery. Oliver Otis Howard was a white Christian Civil War Union general from Maine who lost his right arm during the conflict, yet continued to fight in the war. Howard went on to become the commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau, an institution of the United States government designed to assist and protect blacks after the war during the period of Reconstruction, the most egalitarian period in U.S. history. As head of the Freedmen’s Bureau, Howard was one of the founders of Howard University (named for him), becoming its third president (1869-74). Liberal and religious education departments were central to Howard University at its beginning, but so were the departments of law, pharmacy, medicine, dentistry and music, which all developed within the first 20 years.

It is also important to note that at its start, Howard was open to men and women of all races. “The student body included, in addition to Black and white Americans, Chinese, West Indians, Africans, and American Indians” according to Michael R. Winston’s “The Story Behind Howard’s Seal” (1976). Howard’s original seal includes black and American Indian figures and the original motto of Howard was “Equal Rights and Knowledge For All.” This seal and motto lasted for about forty years but both died under the pressure of Jim Crow segregation, a product of the white racist “redeemers” taking power in the South with the defeat of Reconstruction. Howard University survived, but it primarily went on to serve, as it does to this day, to educate elite blacks, whom W.E.B. Du Bois deemed “the talented tenth.”

K.S.