Edward Waters University

Overview

Edward Waters University is a private, Christian historically Black university in Jacksonville, Florida, founded in 1866 by members of the African Methodist Episcopal Church to educate freedmen and their children — the first independent institution of higher education and the first HBCU in Florida. The AME Church, the first independent Black denomination in the United States, was founded in Philadelphia in 1816 and sent missionaries south after the Civil War; the school was originally named Brown Theological Institute by the state’s first AME pastor, William G. Steward, with Charles H. Pearce also involved in its founding. Financial difficulties closed the school for much of the 1870s; it reopened in 1883 as the East Florida Conference High School, later the East Florida Scientific and Divinity High School, and in 1892 was renamed for Edward Waters, the third bishop of the AME Church.

Rebuilding After Fire

The original Edward Waters campus was destroyed in Jacksonville’s Great Fire of 1901. The college secured new land by 1904 and rebuilt, later gaining accreditation as a junior college in 1955 under President William B. Stewart. It restored a four-year curriculum five years afterward, and in 1979 was accredited as a four-year institution by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, beginning to award bachelor’s degrees.