Most people know their names, but some may not know that these celebrities and prominent people attended Historically Black Colleges and Universities, or HBCUs.
The country’s top Black elected official, Vice President Kamala Harris, graduated from Howard University in Washington, D.C. So did the actor Chadwick Boseman, who gained international acclaim with his role as T’Challa in the Black Panther (2018) movie.
Morehouse College in Atlanta is the alma mater of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Spike Lee (shown here), the actor, writer, director, and movie producer. King’s protégé the Rev. Jesse Jackson went to North Carolina A&T State University.
Often considered Morehouse’s sister college, Spelman College is the institution where Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Alice Walker got her education. Another Spelman graduate, civil rights activist Marian Wright Edelman, was the first African American woman to pass the bar exam in Mississippi, and she founded the Children’s Defense Fund.
Before Jerry Rice became an All-Pro wide receiver for the National Football League’s San Francisco 49ers, he was catching passes in Itta Bena, Mississippi, at Mississippi Valley State University. Another HBCU attendee with a well-known name is media mogul Oprah Winfrey. She graduated from Tennessee State University in Nashville. Popular ESPN host Stephen A. Smith went to Winston-Salem State University in North Carolina.
As a lawyer, Thurgood Marshall won 29 of the 32 cases he argued before the U.S. Supreme Court, including the 1954 landmark Brown v. Board of Education, which ended school system segregation. A double-HBCU graduate, Marshall went to Lincoln University in Pennsylvania and earned a law degree at Howard University Law School before eventually becoming a Supreme Court justice.
Booker T. Washington, who was enslaved and is the founder of what is today Tuskegee University in Alabama, attended what is now Hampton University in Virginia.