DC’s only public university has pre-Civil War roots

by David Jonas Bardin

A major landmark in our neighborhood is the University of the District of Columbia’s main campus. But UDC’s roots were spread throughout the city, and sprouted before the Civil War.

In 1975, a brand new DC Council compelled three rival and independent-minded public institutions to join together under one governing UDC board, despite their cultural differences. All were very affordable, low-tuition schools.

Congressman Charles Diggs (D-Mich.), then chairman of the House of Representatives Committee on DC, had pressed for a merger. Congress authorized it in 1974. But true consolidation was hard and slow – very slow. It was still incomplete ten years later. (Another decade beyond that, in 1996, the DC Council attached the former Antioch Law School to UDC.)

UDC’s new Board of Trustees held its first meeting on May 20, 1976. Its founding chairman was Ronald H. Brown (1941-1996), later Secretary of Commerce under President Bill Clinton. UDC’s first annual report (for 1975-1976) planned for three campuses. And in recruiting for UDC’s first chief executive officer, the trustees described combined enrollment of all three units as 13,386 and combined faculty as 728.

One of UDC’s three original units – Washington Technical Institute – occupied part of the original Van Ness Campus of the National Bureau of Standards in our neighborhood.

The largest unit, Federal City College, was at several downtown locations, which were all leased.

Both were created by a 1966 Act of Congress and had no prior history.

The third and oldest unit, DC Teachers College, was established in 1955 to overcome racial segregation policies and practices of DC’s public education system. After the Supreme Court held DC’s segregation policy to be unconstitutional in 1954, the DC Board of Education merged its separate colleges for training Black teachers and white teachers.

The Miner Teachers College, the school for Black teacher trainees, had pre-Civil War roots.

Myrtilla Miner, a 36-year-old teacher who had borrowed to pay for her own schooling, undertook a sacred mission: Almost single-handed, she “invaded” DC, “the very citadel of slavery,” in 1851 to help “despised and neglected” free black girls become educated women and teachers in their own right. Famed abolitionist Frederick Douglass (whom I quote) had advised Miner against risking her life for a project he thought was sure to fail. He later praised her success.

Miner’s Black students had virtually no other way of receiving even a most basic education. Free Black people in DC rented space to Miner and enrolled their daughters in her classes – first six girls, then swelling to 40 with a waiting list. She taught general education subjects successfully – in one room, then larger quarters, then on rural land purchased south of Dupont Circle with donations she solicited, including $1,000 out of royalties from the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. She enlisted a board of distinguished abolitionists.

Miner persevered until 1860 in a very hostile environment. She had braved mobs of “rowdies” and arson attempts. DC’s own slave-owning elite and slavery apologists railed against her program. But she achieved a great deal in the nine years she ran the school. Even before her death and burial in Georgetown’s Oak Hill Cemetery in 1864, several of her pupils were teaching at their own schools.

After the end of slavery, Congress recognized and buttressed the institution Miner had pioneered. Its successor and another “normal school” to train white teachers were changed by Congress into four-year teachers colleges in 1929. They merged in 1955.

Successfully integrated under the leadership of President Walter E. Hager (previously president of Wilson Teachers College), the new District of Columbia Teachers College had a majority African-American student body, and a racially-integrated administration and faculty.

At one time, DCTC trained one out of four DC public school teachers. However, key members of Congress who controlled DC budgets were avowed segregationists and did not appreciate successful integration. Denied resources it sought, DCTC’s accreditation was threatened.

In 1966, Paul P. Cooke became its president, and he set to setting things right.

Under his eight-year leadership, the college revived, tripled stagnant enrollment, and bolstered accreditation.

UDC’s first annual report, published nearly 50 years ago, summarized its history as “at the same time very old and very new.”

Today, UDC is the only public university in the District. It is an accredited institution of higher education, the nation’s only urban public land grant university, and one of 106 historically black colleges and universities in the nation.

This is an adapted abridged version of the original article, which was published in January 2014. The cover image, of the Miner cheerleaders, is from a 2015 post.