Howard University: The Mecca — History, Notable Alumni and a Visiting Guide
This Howard University history, notable alumni and visiting guide opens our Education Series at the flagship: the university chartered by Congress, raised on a Washington hill, and loved for generations simply as The Mecca.
Every family in our world has a Howard story, whether or not anyone in it has yet worn the blue and white.
That is what this Howard University history, notable alumni and visiting guide is really about: not just a university, but an inheritance — the place generations of Black families have pointed their children toward and said, there; that is what we come from, and that is where people like us become who they are going to be.
Howard sits in Washington, D.C., close enough to the Capitol that its students grow up in the daily weather of American power, and it carries a distinction no other historically Black university holds.
Come with us through the founding, the name everybody knows it by, the alumni who changed the country, and the practical business of visiting and attending — because for the reader of this magazine, Howard is never only a school choice. It is a homecoming that starts before the acceptance letter arrives.
The Founding: A University Chartered by Congress
The history, as the university’s own chroniclers tell it, begins in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War.
Members of Washington’s First Congregational Society first imagined a seminary for training Black clergymen; the vision widened quickly into a university, and the institution that resulted was named after one of its founders, Union general Oliver Otis Howard, opened in 1867, and established through an act of Congress.
The founders’ intent was specific and urgent: to educate and train Black physicians, teachers and ministers for a nation of nearly four million newly freed people. The professional schools followed with a speed that still startles.
Howard’s own anniversary accounting lists the first medical school at an HBCU in 1868, the first law school at an HBCU in 1869, and the first dental school at an HBCU in 1881 — the fifth oldest dental school in the country and the only one in the District of Columbia. Read that sequence slowly.
Within fourteen years of emancipation, on one Washington hill, Black America had built the classrooms that would produce its doctors, its lawyers and its dentists for a century. That is the foundation under everything that follows: Howard was not founded to imitate anyone else’s university.
It was founded to supply a people with the professions they had been barred from — and it has never stopped.
One more distinction belongs in every family’s telling, because it is unique in American education.
Federally chartered, privately governed, and unmistakably ours: that combination is the institution in one sentence.
Why “The Mecca” — and What the Yard Really Is
Families repeat the nickname; fewer know it is documented in the university’s own student press more than a century ago.
Research in Howard’s digital archives found one of the earliest references to “The Mecca” in the February 26, 1909 edition of the Howard University Journal, in words by a student named J. A. Mitchell that deserve to be read exactly as written:
“Howard indeed bids well to become the Mecca, toward which the eyes of our youth will instinctively turn.”— J. A. Mitchell, Howard University Journal, 1909, via The Conversation
The prophecy held.
Writers who have tried to define the word since keep arriving at the same distinction Ta-Nehisi Coates drew for his own son: the Mecca is not only the institution — its schools, its hospital, its libraries — but the vibrant community of young Black people from every background, class and corner of the diaspora gathered in one place, which is what truly rouses and inspires.
Student writers at Howard today describe the same living thing: a strong alumni network, students offered opportunities to propel their careers that they would not have had in their hometowns, and a legacy of excellence carried as much by the students attending today as by the famous names who came before.
The physical heart of it is the Yard — the Upper Quadrangle — the green room of Black America, where the university’s life is conducted in public: between classes, at noon, and above all at homecoming. When your family visits, do not rush the Yard. Sit.
Watch who greets whom. That choreography is the curriculum underneath the curriculum.
The Alumni: A Roll the Country Already Knows
Notable alumni lists can feel like boasting until you read Howard’s, which reads instead like a table of contents for modern American life.
The university’s own magazine counts among its graduates Vice President Kamala Harris — the first Black and South Asian woman to hold the office — Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, who studied law at Howard before remaking American law, and Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, a Howard graduate of 1953 and the first and only Black American to win the Nobel Prize for literature.
Around them, the constellation keeps going: actor Chadwick Boseman, whose name the university’s College of Fine Arts now carries; singer Roberta Flack, who studied music at Howard; Zora Neale Hurston, novelist and anthropologist, who co-founded the campus newspaper The Hilltop in 1924; actors Taraji P. Henson, Phylicia Rashad and Debbie Allen; Virginia governor L. Douglas Wilder, the first elected Black governor in the nation; and, among the faculty who shaped the place, Ralph Bunche, the first Black American to win a Nobel Prize.
Alumni directories group them by field — politics, entertainment, literature and activism, from Elijah Cummings and Stokely Carmichael to Ta-Nehisi Coates — but the honest grouping is simpler: wherever a door in American life was opened for the first time, there is a fair chance a Bison was holding it.
For a young person choosing a college, that is not decoration. It is a network, a standard, and a set of introductions that begin on the first day of freshman year.
Visiting: Homecoming, the Open House, and Doing the Trip Properly
Visit twice if you can: once quietly, on an ordinary class day, and once at homecoming — because Howard at homecoming is a national institution in itself.
The university’s alumni office traces the tradition to the inaugural homecoming game against Lincoln University in 1924, a week of athletic, entertainment, spiritual, academic and cultural events that now draws tens of thousands. Two practical gifts hide inside that pageantry for a prospective family.
First, homecoming season brings open houses at Howard’s schools and colleges — a sanctioned way to walk a seventeen-year-old through the actual buildings of the actual programmes while alumni are everywhere to be questioned.
Second, Yardfest, the signature outdoor celebration on the Yard, shows a visiting family the culture unfiltered: the university’s event listing describes live stage performances reflecting the Howard diaspora on the Upper Quadrangle, in an event covered by national publications and chronicled by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.
Stay in the city properly — homecoming week fills Washington’s best hotels early, and the families who treat the trip as the pilgrimage it is book the way they book Derby or Art Basel: ahead.
Use the Metro’s Green Line stations near campus rather than fighting the road closures the university itself warns visitors about, and leave one unstructured afternoon for the neighbourhoods around the university, because a Howard education is also an education in Washington.
Attending: Admissions Reality and the Cost, With the Sources Named
Now the numbers, handled the way this magazine always handles them: attributed, ranged, and honest about disagreement.
Howard is selective, and published acceptance figures vary by source and cycle — Money’s college profile lists an acceptance rate of 41%, an average GPA of 3.75, and test-optional admissions, while other aggregators carry figures from the low thirties to the high forties for different classes.
Treat any single number as one publisher’s snapshot, and treat the underlying reality as settled: a strong transcript, a serious essay, and a record of genuine engagement are the price of admission, and legacy affection — however deep in a family — is a tailwind, never a ticket.
On cost, Money’s profile estimates a full price of $61,250 for the year, with an estimated price after average financial aid of $35,180, and reports that 99% of undergraduates receive some grant aid.
Older published tuition figures still circulating online are lower, which is exactly why families should price the current year from the university and a current publisher rather than from memory.
The strategic point for our readers is the one our school-choosing guide makes about every great school: fit first, fame second — and at Howard, uniquely, the fit includes a culture. A student who wants to be formed by Black excellence at full strength, in the capital, inside a century-and-a-half of firsts, will find no substitute.
A student who wants something else will find Howard’s very strength a weight. Visit, watch your child on the Yard, and you will know.
Black Life at Howard: The Formation Between Classes
Ask alumni what formed them and few begin with a syllabus. They begin with the life between classes — and at Howard that life is organised, historic and proudly public.
The Divine Nine fraternities and sororities are woven through the university’s calendar, nowhere more visibly than at the homecoming Greek step show, which the university’s own schedule describes as a blend of military precision, acrobatics, dance, rhythm, song and chant — part entertainment, part history lesson, part ancestral homage, and part expression of pride.
Around that Greek spine runs a full civic and cultural city: chapel, a student fashion show that the university notes places Howard students at the vanguard of a style influence that permeates global fashion, school and college open houses, and the ordinary daily miracle of the Yard itself. The outcomes match the atmosphere.
Alumni profiles note that Howard has produced more Black doctorate recipients than any other non-profit university, and its own anniversary accounting observes that it ranks among the highest producers of the nation’s Black professionals across medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, engineering, nursing, architecture, religion, law, music, social work and education.
For a legacy family, this is the attending note that matters most: a child at Howard is not merely enrolled. They are inducted — into organisations, standards and friendships that alumni carry, visibly and for life, into every boardroom, practice and studio they later enter. Families who understand that are not choosing a college.
They are choosing who will help finish raising their child, and Howard has been answering that trust since 1867.
This is the first entry in our Education Series, and it begins where the series had to begin. The sister entry that follows takes us to Atlanta and to Spelman College — a different kind of flagship, built for women, bound to Howard by a century of shared life.
Read them together, the way our families have always held them: two hills, one inheritance.
Spelman College: The Sisterhood That Builds
Choosing the School
The First Gate: Preschool
Black Wall Street: Greenwood
The Conversation (via Metropolitan Digital) — “The Untold Story of How Howard University Came to Be Known as ‘The Mecca’”
The Dig at Howard University — “101 Reasons Howard Is ‘One of One’”
Money — “Howard University: Cost, Acceptance Rate, Outcomes”
Howard University Alumni Relations — “Homecoming”
Howard University Events — “Yardfest Day 1 (Concert)”
Her Campus at Howard — “The Mecca of Black Excellence”
HBCU Leggings — “Why Is Howard University Called ‘The Mecca’?”
LA Phil (WDCH) — “Howard University Famous Alumni”
The Dig at Howard University — “Howard University Announces 100th Homecoming Anniversary Schedule”
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