Cornell Black Students, Alpha Phi Alpha and a Visiting Guide: Any Person, Any Study

Of all the Ivies, Cornell was founded on the widest promise — and Black students have been collecting on it, and enlarging it, since 1869. This Cornell black students Alpha Phi Alpha visiting guide covers the founding ground in Ithaca: the Seven Jewels, Ujamaa, the Africana Center, the numbers, and the gorges.

Produced and Edited by the Bourgeois Society Staff

Start with the sentence the university still lives under.

Our Cornell black students Alpha Phi Alpha visiting guide begins where Cornell itself begins — with a founder who wrote the admissions policy into a single breath, and with the seven young men who, four decades later, built the first Black Greek-letter fraternity in American history on this campus because the promise needed a house to live in.

If your family is weighing Ithaca — the hill, the weather, the distance — weigh this too: no Ivy's founding documents speak our language as plainly as Cornell's do.

"I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study."— Ezra Cornell, 1865, the university's motto

The Founding Ground

Cornell is the youngest of the Ivies and the only one born of the land-grant idea.

On April 27, 1865, a New York State Senate bill named the new university the state's land-grant institution; Senator Ezra Cornell offered his farm in Ithaca and $500,000 of his personal fortune as the founding endowment, and his fellow senator Andrew Dickson White became its first president.

The university was inaugurated on October 7, 1868, with 412 men enrolled — and, as the New World Encyclopedia's history records, two years later Cornell admitted its first women, the first coeducational school among what became the Ivy League.

From the founding, the institution was conceived as coeducational and nonsectarian, with admission offered irrespective of gender, religion or race — radical terms for 1865, written into the charter era rather than added later.

Cornell's own giving pages trace the motto to Ezra Cornell's hand: he first wrote the words in a letter to White in February 1868 and spoke them again at the dedication that October. "Any person, any study" is not a slogan the marketing office found. It is the deed to the place.

The breadth is the distinction. Cornell is organised into seven undergraduate colleges — arts and sciences, engineering, agriculture and life sciences, human ecology, industrial and labour relations, architecture and art and planning, and the Dyson–Johnson business orbit — several of them state-supported contract colleges, a public-private structure no other Ivy has.

A student can study hotel administration, entomology, labour law or landscape architecture at Ivy standard, on a 745-acre campus above Cayuga Lake.

For our readers, the practical translation is this: Cornell holds more kinds of excellence under one name than any of its peers, including kinds — agriculture, hospitality, labour relations — that built a great many Black family fortunes and professions.

December 4, 1906: The Seven Jewels

Here is the ground every Black family should stand on when they visit.

Cornell's Rare and Manuscript Collections record that Alpha Phi Alpha was established at Cornell University in 1906 — the first Black fraternity at Cornell — founded by Henry Arthur Callis, Charles Henry Chapman, Eugene Kinckle Jones, George Biddle Kelley, Nathaniel Allison Murray, Robert Harold Ogle and Vertner Woodson Tandy. The Seven Jewels.

The Africana Studies and Research Center's own account adds the address and the ache underneath the honour: the fraternity's original home was a house at 421 North Albany Street, and what began there as a literary and social club became, on December 4, 1906, the Alpha Chapter of a fraternity that now counts some 730 active chapters across the Americas, Africa, Europe, the Caribbean and Asia.

Its alumni include Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Thurgood Marshall, W. E. B. Du Bois, Duke Ellington and Jesse Owens — the Africana Center's list, and a fair summary of twentieth-century Black achievement in one sentence.

Understand what the Jewels were answering.

In the early 1900s Cornell welcomed Black students in the classroom — among the few great universities that did — but the social order of the day barred them from campus housing and fraternity life; Black students lodged with local Black families in Ithaca and many worked in the very fraternity houses that would not admit them.

So they built their own institution, with scholarship, fellowship, good character and the uplifting of humanity as its stated foundation — Cornell's library exhibition of the university's first 150 years uses exactly those terms. The Alpha Chapter is still active at Cornell. When your son walks past that history, he is not reading about somebody else's fraternity.

He is standing at the source.

The House and the Center: Ujamaa and Africana

Black Cornell built twice. The second building came out of 1969, when Black students — their numbers grown through the decade under a university programme to recruit and support minority students — occupied Willard Straight Hall for 35 hours and emerged with an agreement whose fruits still structure Black life on the hill.

The Cornell Daily Sun's account of the anniversary records that the settlement brought the establishment of the Africana Studies and Research Center and the creation of Ujamaa Residential College, with Professor James Turner as the Center's founding director.

We tell this the way this magazine tells all such history: factually, briefly, and in the inheritance register — what matters for your family is what stands today because those students insisted. The Africana Center is a scholarly institution of the first rank.

And Ujamaa — the name is the Swahili word for cooperative economics, working together as an extended family — is a living home: the Cornell Chronicle describes its Sunday evening Unity Hour discussions, study groups, public service in Ithaca and an annual welcome barbecue, a residence that is, in the words of one alumna director quoted there, "more than a residence — a cultural living place."

Add Black Students United and the full Divine Nine presence that descends from the Alpha Chapter, and a Black student at Cornell is never inventing community from nothing. She is moving into a house with the furniture already arranged — some of it arranged in 1906.

The Alumni Proof

Cornell's Black roll begins early and runs straight through the American century. The university admitted its first student of African descent, William Bowler of Haiti, in 1869 — a date carried in the Cornell 150 exhibition materials — and Jane Eleanor Datcher became, in 1890, the first known Black woman to earn a Cornell undergraduate degree and the first Black woman in the United States to earn a degree in botany. In the century that followed: Jerome "Brud" Holland, the first Black student to play on Cornell's football team, who went on to the presidency of Delaware State and of Hampton Institute, an ambassadorship to Sweden and the Presidential Medal of Freedom; Samuel Pierce, who took both his undergraduate and law degrees at Cornell, argued before the Supreme Court on behalf of Dr. King and the New York Times in New York Times v. Sullivan, and served as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development; and Flemmie Kittrell, who earned her Cornell Ph.D. in nutrition in 1936 — the first African American woman to earn a doctorate in the field — and built the home economics programme at Howard around the needs of low-income and minority families.

And then there is the name that silences the dinner-table argument about whether a Black girl from Lorain, Ohio, can be formed by this hill. Toni Morrison took her master's degree in English at Cornell in 1955.

Cornell's English department records that her Beloved won the Pulitzer Prize and that in 1993 she became the first African American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature; the university has named a residence hall for her, as it has for her classmate-era contemporary Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the Class of 1954. Morrison Hall is not a metaphor.

First-year students sleep in it.

Attending: The Numbers, Attributed

The ledger, sourced as always.

CollegeData's profile puts Cornell's undergraduates at 16,125, with a cost of attendance of $99,734 — tuition and fees of $74,970 and room and board of $21,348 in the figures it publishes — and reports that Cornell meets an average of 100 percent of demonstrated need, with Black or African American students at 6.5 percent of the student body in its data.

On selectivity, published figures cluster in one narrow band: the Princeton Review lists an acceptance rate of about eight percent, and a Common Data Set compilation for 2024–25 puts it at 8.4 percent — call it, honestly, fewer than one applicant in eleven, with the seven colleges each admitting their own students to their own standards.

One structural mercy deserves emphasis for families watching the total: three of Cornell's undergraduate colleges are state-supported contract colleges, and New York families in particular should price those colleges separately before assuming the whole university costs the endowed-college figure. Everywhere else, the rule from our other guides holds — the net-price calculator first, the sticker price last.

One more piece of architecture deserves a family's attention, because it explains how a Cornell application is actually read. There is no single Cornell door.

CollegeData's overview is explicit that the university's seven undergraduate colleges each define their own academic programmes, admit their own students, and provide their own faculty and advising — a young woman applies to Human Ecology or to Arts and Sciences, not to Cornell in the abstract, and her file is judged by people who teach the subject she loves.

For our families this is an advantage hiding in plain sight: a student whose passion is hospitality, labour relations, nutrition, agriculture or design can apply to a college where that passion is the whole institution, at a standard no specialist school elsewhere can match. It also means the visit should be specific.

Tour the college your child would actually enter, sit in its building, eat in its dining hall. The 745-acre campus the same profile describes is really seven small universities sharing one hill, one lake light and one founding sentence — and the right one of the seven is a decision worth a full afternoon.

The recruitment chapter matters too, because it set the stage for everything after.

Cornell's own 150th-anniversary exhibition records that in 1964 President James Perkins, with support from the Rockefeller and Ford foundations, instituted the Committee on Special Education Projects to encourage and support minority students to come to Cornell — among the earliest such commitments at a university of Cornell's rank, and the reason the Black student population whose institution-building fills this article was present in Ithaca in real numbers by the decade's end.

The line from that committee to the Africana Center to Morrison Hall is the honest shape of Cornell's Black history: a founding promise, a mid-century investment, and then generations of Black students and faculty doing the building themselves.

Visiting Ithaca

Ithaca rewards the family that gives it two days.

Take the campus tour — you will climb, so wear the good walking shoes without apology — and make sure your route crosses a gorge bridge and pauses at the overlooks; the campus is threaded with gorges and waterfalls, and their beauty is not decoration but daily life here, the walk between a lecture and a library.

Ask, specifically, to see Ujamaa and to pass the Africana Center, and if your visit can be timed to a Unity Hour or a Black Students United event, so much the better: you are inspecting a community, not just a campus.

For the stay, the Statler Hotel sits on campus itself — the university's own teaching hotel, a AAA Four Diamond property in the listings — which puts you inside the rhythm of the place from breakfast onward; downtown Ithaca, at the foot of the hill around the Commons, is the livelier, less expensive base, with the Finger Lakes wine country as the family's reward on the drive out.

Come in term time, come in daylight, and let your student lead the second day. The ones who choose Cornell choose the hill itself — the gorges, the lake light, the long winters that make the libraries glow. If your child stands on that bridge and goes quiet in the right way, you have your answer.

Dartmouth: The Mountain School and Its Black Lineage
Penn: Wharton, and the City Around It
Howard University: The Mecca
Choosing the School
The First Gate: Preschool
Raising Heirs, Not Dependents

New World Encyclopedia — "Cornell University"
Giving to Cornell — "To Do the Greatest Good: An Origin Story"
Cornell Library, Rare and Manuscript Collections — "Guide to the Alpha Phi Alpha Records"
Cornell Africana Studies and Research Center — "First Black Fraternity, Founded at Cornell"
The Cornell Daily Sun — "Africana Center Founding Director Prof. James Turner to Be Honored"
Cornell Chronicle — "Ujamaa to Honor Past, Present at 40th Anniversary"
The Cornell Review — "Celebrating Black History Month" (Holland, Pierce)
Cornell Literatures in English — "Morrison, Ginsburg to Be Honored with U.S. Postage Stamps"
The Cornell Daily Sun — "Influential Cornell Women" (Kittrell, Morrison)
CollegeData — "Cornell University Overview"
The Princeton Review — "Cornell University Rankings and Reviews"
The Statler Hotel at Cornell University
Cornell Library — "150 Ways to Say Cornell" Exhibition (COSEP, first students)

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Of all the Ivies, Cornell was founded on the widest promise — and Black students have been collecting on it, and enlarging it, since 1869. This Cornell black students Alpha Phi Alpha visiting guide covers the founding ground in Ithaca: the Seven Jewels, Ujamaa, the Africana Center, the numbers, and the gorges. It links to 7 stories and articles — open any card to read the full piece.

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Of all the Ivies, Cornell was founded on the widest promise — and Black students have been collecting on it, and enlarging it, since 1869. This Cornell black students Alpha Phi Alpha visiting guide covers the founding ground in Ithaca: the Seven Jewels, Ujamaa, the Africana Center, the numbers, and the gorges.

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