Shaw University

Overview

Shaw University is a private historically Black university in Raleigh, North Carolina, founded December 1, 1865, the oldest HBCU to begin offering courses in the Southern United States. It began as a theological class for freedmen meeting at the Guion Hotel, moving the following year to a wooden building at Blount and Cabarrus Streets, where it operated as the Raleigh Institute until 1870. That year it relocated to its current site, formerly the property of Confederate General Rufus Barringer, and was renamed the Shaw Collegiate Institute in honor of Elijah Shaw; it was officially chartered by the state as Shaw University in 1875. Along with Howard University, Hampton University, Lincoln University, and Virginia Union University, Shaw was a co-founding member of the NCAA Division II’s Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association.

Estey Hall

Shaw was founded in 1865 by the American Baptist Home Mission Society and the pastor Henry Martin Tupper. In 1870, a $5,000 gift from Elijah Shaw helped fund the purchase of 12 acres of land — property once owned by a Confederate general, where Tupper and his wife had once hidden from a Ku Klux Klan lynch mob — and the construction of Shaw Hall, then the most commodious school building in North Carolina. In 1873, the university built Estey Hall with an $8,000 gift from Vermont’s Estey family: the first building constructed in the United States for the higher education of African-American women.