Institute for Colored Youth Founded in Philadelphia

Quaker philanthropist Richard Humphreys endowed the Institute for Colored Youth in Philadelphia — the first Quaker-founded school for Black Americans and a forerunner of Cheyney University, now the oldest HBCU in the US. The Institute taught classical curriculum, sciences, and trades. By the 1850s it produced Black teachers who staffed schools across the mid-Atlantic, with Fanny Jackson Coppin becoming its celebrated principal after the war.