Albany State University

Overview

Albany State University is a public historically Black university in Albany, Georgia, founded in 1903 and now the largest HBCU in the state as part of the University System of Georgia. It was founded by Joseph Winthrop Holley, born in 1874 to formerly enslaved parents in Winnsboro, South Carolina. Educators arranged for Holley’s schooling at Brainerd Institute and Revere Lay College, where he met New England businessman Rowland Hazard, who helped fund his continued education at Phillips Academy and later at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. Inspired by W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk to return to the South, Holley relocated to Albany and, with a $2,600 gift from the Hazard family, organized a board of trustees and purchased 50 acres of land for the campus of what he founded in 1903 as the Albany Bible and Manual Training Institute — all within a year.