Just nine years after Augusta Institute’s founding in Georgia, a bloody massacre took place directly across the Savannah River in Hamburg, South Carolina. Since 1867, the leaders of the institute – a small, all-Black seminary – had endured various attacks by local white citizens for educating Black students following the civil war. But the Hamburg massacre, which resulted in the execution of six Black men ahead of one of the most contentious presidential elections in US history, epitomized the extent of post-emancipation violence against Black advancement. Designed to terrorize newly freed citizens, the massacre set the standard for how Black communities could be punished for amassing political and institutional power.
After learning firsthand that Black political mobility and Black education stoked white resentment and violence, the seminary men fled to Atlanta. They strategically broke new ground for their institution on former Union army barracks; its location on a hill at the city’s highest elevation point gave them a vantage of any attempts upon it. Two decades later, the school was renamed Morehouse College, at the time one of the nation’s only colleges for Black men. A few years after that, Spelman College, a college for Black women, relocated less than a mile away from Morehouse, to achieve safety in numbers.
