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Editor's Note: Throughout its history, Howard University has been considered the "capstone of Negro higher education. " Yet, strangely, until the final third of the twentieth century there was strong color prejudice at the university against dark-skinned Negroes.
HOWARD UNIVERSITY WAS founded in 1866 by O.O. Howard, a white United States Army general. Incorporated in 1867, the private school received most of its early support from the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands. By 1930 the school received almost $1.5 million in support. With this financial endowment, Howard developed 10 programs of study - including a school of music, a school of religion, and a college of medicine - which provided more options for concentrated instruction than most historically black colleges.
Color prejudice at Howard - or the belief in color prejudice - was a topic of discussion even during the very early history of the school, as an 1887 scandal involving the medical school valedictorian illustrates. At Howard's medical school, a two-thirds-majority vote was required for one to be elected as valedictorian. White students, who were small in number at Howard, nominated C.C. Johnson, a fair-complexioned man who "[could not] be distinguished from white." The black students protested his selection, indicating that he was too light to represent the experience of black students; white and fair students protested the counter-selection of a dark student for similar reasons. The issue was referred to the faculty, who selected a young woman as valedictorian. She identified herself as white.
During this time, Washington, D.C., was still a predominantly southern city, and Howard was part of a consortium of southern, historically black colleges that contended with rumors of colorism in its admission practices and staffing policies. Fair-skinned blacks in the administration were often perceived at Howard to give preferential treatment to "those who resembled themselves"; moreover, they were thought to exercise a monopoly over black higher education. There were also said to be many instances throughout Howard's history of faculty members who blurred the race line - passing for white while maintaining full association with the historically black college - an indication of the level of invisibility of black life to their white contemporaries.
In 1914, 57 black institutions were listed in The Negro Year Book under...