In the years after the Civil War, there were millions of newly-freed Black children and adults who emerged from slavery worn but eager and determined to get something they never had—a chance to learn how to read the Bible, write their names and words on a page, and be educated. Even before the Civil War, some Blacks in the North were pressing their way forward into church-basement-turned schools and rough-hewn wood frame rooms established just for them mostly by benevolent White Christians.
In 1837, the largess of a Quaker philanthropist established Cheyney University of Pennsylvania, which began as the African Institute, a school for Black children. But years later, religious leaders, local churches, missionaries, and denominations were descending across the South in the 19th century, believing that it was worth it to spend their time and money and do the right thing when they decided to establish seminaries, classrooms, colleges, and even medical schools for Blacks.
John Miller Dickey, a Presbyterian minister, and his Quaker wife were among them. In 1854, Dickey placed Ashmun Institute, now Lincoln University of Pennsylvania, amid rolling farmlands on a wooded hilltop in southern Chester County when he set out to offer training in theology, the classics, and the sciences to young Black men who had no other opportunities for higher education.
But even as he prepared to dedicate Lincoln University (formerly Ashmun Institute), one of the nation’s oldest HBCUs, Dickey struggled to find favor, funding and support from his church and his peers. In fact, on Dec. 30, 1856, the day Lincoln was dedicated, “Hope and fear struggled in each breast as they contemplated the future of the first American College looking to the education of a people ‘despised and rejected.’ With prayer they committed it to God,” wrote William D. Johnson, then a student at Lincoln in 1867. Johnson’s book, “The Nation’s First Pledge of Emancipation,” chronicles Lincoln’s early history.
Led by ‘Consciences and Hearts’
The Board of Bishops of the Methodist Episcopal Church, meeting in November 1866, thought nothing was more urgent than responding to the emancipation of 4 million slaves who were now “at our very door.”
Led by their “consciences and hearts,” the Board of Bishops declared they would act to rescue and educate Blacks. They didn’t wait for Southern states to decide whether they were going to “make some provision for the education of the colored children now growing up in utter ignorance in their midst,” they wrote following that November 1866 meeting.
