Western University was a historically Black college at quindaro in what is now kansas-city-kansas, operating from Reconstruction until the Second World War and widely described as the first Black college west of the Mississippi River. It grew out of a freedmen’s school begun in the 1860s, took its name in 1891 when it moved to Ward Hall near 27th and Sewell, and reached its height in the early twentieth century under president William Tecumseh Vernon, who paired a Tuskegee-style industrial curriculum with a music department that trained Eva Jessye, Nora Douglas Holt, and Etta Moten Barnett. A 1924 fire, the withdrawal of African Methodist Episcopal Church funding in 1933, and the Great Depression ended it; the last class graduated in 1943. No academic buildings survive. The John Brown statue raised by its students in 1911 still stands on the ground, and the nearby Vernon Multipurpose Center carries the name of its best-known president.

This page treats Western University as an institution. For the town, the Underground Railroad crossing, the archaeological ruins, and the National Historic Landmark process, see quindaro.

Origins — the Quindaro Freedman’s School

The institution began with Eben Blachly, a Presbyterian minister who started teaching the children of formerly enslaved people in 1862 at Quindaro; Blachly and his wife Jane were for years the only two teachers, and he continued until his death in 1877.12 The effort was formalized by charter — Wikipedia dates a county charter registered by a committee of white abolitionists to 1865, while Legends of Kansas dates the charter to 1867, the same year state funding began.12 Blachly bequeathed roughly 100 acres in the 1870s to sustain the school.1

In 1872 the Kansas legislature established a “Colored Normal School” — a four-year teacher-training program — within what was then called Freedman’s University, intended to make the institution self-sustaining by producing teachers.21 The Panic of 1873 forced enrollment cuts.1

Charles Henry Langston

Charles Henry Langston, the abolitionist, Oberlin Rescue defendant, Black-suffrage organizer, and grandfather of poet Langston Hughes, became principal of the normal school in 1872.12 His tenure connects Quindaro directly to the national antislavery leadership of the previous generation and, through his descendants, to the Harlem Renaissance. The length of his principalship and the circumstances of his departure are not established by sources retrieved here.

AME Church control and the name “Western University”

The African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church took over the institution — Legends of Kansas dates the assumption of control to 1881, Wikipedia to the “late 1800s” — and reoriented it from a purely normal-school model toward a vocational and college-preparatory program modeled on Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute.21 The school took the name Western University in 1891, when it relocated to newly built Ward Hall near 27th and Sewell, above the old lower townsite.2

Vernon, industrial education, and the peak years

Reverend William Tecumseh Vernon arrived in 1896 and was made president at age 25.13 Vernon, born in Lebanon, Missouri, in 1871, had been valedictorian at Lincoln University in 1890 and held a theology degree from Wilberforce University.4 Vernon’s central achievement was political: he secured recurring state appropriations for a public State Industrial Department attached to a church-run college — an unusual hybrid — including a $10,000 legislative appropriation obtained with the help of Governor William Stanley, for whom the resulting Stanley Hall was named.25 Under his administration the campus grew from one building to four and enrollment from roughly 25 to 400 students; enrollment stood at about 200 by 1906 and peaked at 400–500 annually in the 1920s.62 Vernon brought Booker T. Washington to address the students in 1906.5

By 1904 the curriculum included architectural and mechanical drawing, carpentry, cabinet-making, printing, wood-turning, business (stenography and typing), dressmaking, tailoring, music, and agriculture; later listings add blacksmithing, wheelwrighting, auto mechanics, and livestock training.21 The Quindaro Ruins Project Foundation additionally credits Western with a nursing school and describes it as host to the first Black ROTC program — a claim not corroborated by the other sources retrieved here.

Vernon left the presidency in 1906 to become Register of the Treasury under Theodore Roosevelt, an appointment that put his signature on U.S. currency; he was later Supervisor of Indian and Negro Schools in Oklahoma, president of Campbell College in Mississippi, and, from 1920, an AME bishop who served four years as a missionary in the Transvaal.3 Inman E. Page served as president from 1916 to 1918.1

The music department

After 1903, Robert G. Jackson built the music program that became Western’s most durable legacy, forming the Jackson Jubilee Singers, who toured nationally on the Chautauqua circuit from 1907 to 1940.1 The department was regarded as the leading Black musical-training center in the Midwest.21 Three of its women students had national careers:

  • Eva Jessye — founded her own choir, worked with Virgil Thomson, and served as choral director for George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess.12
  • Nora Douglas Holt — composer, music critic, and performer in the United States and Europe.1
  • Etta Moten Barnett — singer who performed the lead role of Bess in Porgy and Bess revivals and tours.1

Decline and closure

The 1924 fire that destroyed the Ward Hall dormitories began the institution’s decline.2 The AME Church withdrew financial support in 1933; the State of Kansas stepped in, and Governor Alf Landon brought Vernon back to run the industrial department, where he restored accreditation before retiring in 1936.35 The Great Depression, the wartime draft, buildings in disrepair, and conflict with the church proved decisive.21

The final class — six women, by the Legends of Kansas account; thirteen graduates by Wikipedia’s — completed in 1943, and the school closed.21 Sources differ on the terminal dates: Wikipedia and most secondary coverage give the closure as 1943, while Legends of Kansas states the institution officially closed in 1944 and was legally dissolved in 1948.12 The Quindaro Ruins Project Foundation records the last building demolished in 1944, the same year Vernon died.6 Vernon died in Kansas City, Kansas, on July 25, 1944, at age 73.3

What survives on the site

No academic buildings remain: all were demolished or lost to fire, and only cornerstones of the earliest two halls survive at the townsite.1 Two things anchor the ground:

  • The John Brown statue, erected in 1911 with roughly $2,000 raised by Western’s students, faculty, and supporting churches, still stands at 27th and Sewell within a memorial plaza.216 It is among the oldest monuments to Brown in the country and is unusual in having been paid for by the Black students of the college that stood beside it.
  • The Vernon Multipurpose Center, 3436 North 27th Street — the former Vernon School, a 1936 Works Progress Administration building named for Bishop William T. Vernon that served as an all-Black school until 1972 and reopened in 1976 as a community center.75 It is now home to a senior center and manages the Quindaro Underground Railroad Museum; the building was placed on the Kansas Register of Historic Places in 2004 and the National Register in 2023.7

Significance to Kansas City

Western University is the reason Quindaro’s second life mattered as much as its first. For roughly seventy years it made a bluff above the Missouri River the center of Black higher education between the Mississippi and the Rockies, drawing students from across the region at a time when sumner-high-school in the same city had been created by statute to keep Black teenagers out of the white high school. Its industrial department was one of the few instances of a state legislature funding a program inside a Black church college, and its music department exported Kansas City-trained musicians into the defining American works of the 1930s. The absence of its buildings — as against the survival of the statue its students paid for — is itself part of the record of how the region maintained and then neglected the institution.

Sources

Footnotes

  1. Wikipedia — “Western University (Kansas).” ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7 ↩8 ↩9 ↩10 ↩11 ↩12 ↩13 ↩14 ↩15 ↩16 ↩17 ↩18 ↩19 ↩20

  2. Legends of Kansas — “Quindaro, Kansas – A Free-State Black Town.” ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7 ↩8 ↩9 ↩10 ↩11 ↩12 ↩13 ↩14 ↩15 ↩16

  3. Wikipedia — “William Tecumseh Vernon.” ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  4. Kansas City Black History — “William T. Vernon.” ↩

  5. Freedom’s Frontier National Heritage Area — “Black History Month Spotlight: William Tecumseh Vernon.” ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  6. Quindaro Ruins Project Foundation — “Western University in Kansas.” ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  7. Vernon Multipurpose Center — “The Historic Vernon School.” ↩ ↩2

See also

Categories
  • Concept
  • Building
  • Kck
  • Black History

On the record — ks.city/wiki/buildings/western-university-kansas