Your college here, Spelman, opened in 1881 in the basement of Friendship Baptist Church, founded by two New England teachers, Sophia Packard and Harriet Giles, who came to Atlanta to educate Black women. The college was named for Harvey Buel Spelman, whose family donated critical early funds and whose son-in-law John D. Rockefeller became the institution's most significant early benefactor. Spelman is the oldest historically Black college for women in the United States, and it has become one of the most academically distinguished liberal arts colleges in the country, Black or otherwise.
It has a higher percentage of graduates who go on to earn Ph.D.s than almost any institution in America. Alice Walker, who graduated from Spelman, has said the college taught her what it meant to be educated as a Black woman in America. Marian Wright Edelman graduated from Spelman in 1960, the same year she was arrested in Civil Rights sit-ins, and went on to found the Children's Defense Fund.
The campus you are standing on represents one hundred and forty years of Black women's intellectual life. That is not a small thing.