Here at the edge of campus, six institutions rise together — the largest cluster of historically Black colleges and universities anywhere in the world. The consortium includes Spelman College, Morehouse College, Clark Atlanta University, Morehouse School of Medicine, the Interdenominational Theological Center, and Spelman's affiliated institutions — a concentration of Black higher education that has produced more African-American Ph.D.s, doctors, lawyers, ministers, and civil rights leaders than any comparable collection of institutions anywhere. Atlanta University itself was founded in 1865 by the American Missionary Association, just months after the end of the Civil War, making it among the earliest institutions committed to higher education for freed people in the South.
W.E.B. Du Bois taught sociology here for thirteen years, publishing landmark studies of Black American life. The consortium model — institutions sharing libraries, course offerings, and facilities while maintaining separate identities — was innovative when it was established and remains a powerful model today. Walking through this campus district, you are walking through what it meant for a community to build, against every obstacle, institutions of lasting educational excellence.