What were factors that made a few colleges welcome black women?
State and regional politics played a very large part in college access. Before the Civil War, over 250 institutions offered college-level work; only a select few were open to black or women students. The most notable were Oberlin (founded in 1833), Antioch (1853), and Wilberforce (1856), all in Ohio; Hillsdale (1844) in Michigan; Cheyney (1837) and Lincoln (1854) in Pennsylvania; and Berea (1855) in Kentucky. There were a few states, like Vermont which also offered entrance to one or two black students. Generally, college opportunity blossomed in Northern or Midwestern states. In 1890, black women’s college graduation rate was evenly balanced between Northern and Southern states. Only two decades later, a significant demographic shift had taken place. The time had ended when the North was the paramount region for black women’s educational opportunity; this was the age of Southern institutional growth. I suggest two reasons for this shift: first, the solidification of the Plessy v. Ferg
