Ahead lies the only historically Black liberal arts college for men in the country, where a fifteen-year-old Martin Luther King Jr. enrolled and graduated in 1948. Morehouse was founded in 1867 in the basement of Springfield Baptist Church in Augusta, Georgia, and relocated to Atlanta in 1879. It was renamed for Henry Lyman Morehouse, a Baptist minister and advocate for Black education, in 1913.
The concept of the Morehouse Man — an ethos of intellectual rigor, social responsibility, and dignity — has shaped generations of graduates who have gone on to leadership in medicine, law, politics, business, and the arts. Spike Lee graduated from Morehouse. Samuel L. Jackson.
Edwin Moses. Herman Cain. Louis Sullivan, who served as Secretary of Health and Human Services.
The college shaped them all. But the most consequential Morehouse graduate remains the young man from Auburn Avenue who enrolled at 15, absorbed the college's ethos of leadership and service, and went on to transform the moral landscape of the twentieth century. King gave the 1959 commencement address here as his Civil Rights work was gathering force.
The campus you are standing on formed the man who changed the world.