Lincoln University

Overview

Lincoln University is a public, state-related historically Black university in Lower Oxford Township, Pennsylvania, founded in 1854 as the private Ashmun Institute, becoming a public institution in 1972 — recognized as the first HBCU in the country empowered to grant college degrees. It was founded by Presbyterian minister John Miller Dickey and his wife, Sarah Emlen Cresson, a Quaker, and named for religious leader and social reformer Jehudi Ashmun, to provide higher education to African Americans who had few other opportunities. Dickey, the college’s first president, encouraged early students James Ralston Amos, his brother Thomas Henry Amos, and Armistead Hutchinson Miller to support the colonization of Liberia. Women have received degrees from the university since 1953, making up 66 percent of undergraduate enrollment by 2019.

A Century of Firsts

Ashmun Institute was renamed Lincoln University in 1866, a year after President Lincoln’s assassination. In June 1921, days after the Tulsa race massacre, President Warren Harding delivered Lincoln’s commencement address, speaking on the need for healing and honoring the Black servicemen who had fought in World War I. In 1945, alumnus Horace Mann Bond became Lincoln’s first African-American president, serving twelve years; in 1946, Albert Einstein visited to lecture on physics and speak against racism. Between 1854 and 1954, Lincoln graduates accounted for roughly 20 percent of African American physicians and more than 10 percent of African American lawyers in the United States.