Dr. Daryl Poe, an associate professor of history and political science at Lincoln University and author of Kwame Nkrumah’s Contribution to Pan-Africanism.
While some attended out of mere curiosity and sentiments of Black pride, the majority were there to support alumni who had, against difficult odds, fought for the independence of these new nations and were now running them.
They included alumni like Nnamdi Azikiwe, a classmate of Langston Hughes and Thurgood Marshall and member of Lincoln’s class of 1930, who became Nigeria’s first president in 1963; Kwame Nkrumah, prime minister of Ghana, Black Africa’s first country to gain independence and a member of Lincoln’s class of 1939; and Hastings Kamuzu Banda, a graduate of Meharry Medical College and Malawi’s first president.
Throughout the continent, alumni of leading Black colleges like Fisk, Howard, Lincoln and Tuskegee held prominent positions in government right after independence and in the years leading up to independence. In the early 1950s, the influential Times of
London published a story about 35 Lincoln graduates that held prominent positions on the continent.
Black colleges get a lot of credit for producing most of the leaders of the civil rights struggle—Martin Luther King Jr. (Morehouse), W.E.B. DuBois (Fisk), Jesse Jackson (North Carolina A&T), Andrew Young (Howard) and John Lewis (Fisk). But less known are the immense contributions of the colleges to molding and developing leaders of the struggle for independence in many African countries.
“In his book, Background to Nigerian Nationalism, J.S. Coleman said that African nationalism was born on the campuses of Black colleges in America,” says Dr. Festus Ohaegbulam, a professor emeritus of government and international affairs at the University of South Florida in Tampa.
