Post by The HistoryMakers

Georgetown University’s twenty-ninth president, Patrick Francis Healy, served from 1873 until 1882. Litigator Theodore V. Wells, Jr. explained: “James and Patrick Healy were the sons of a white Irishman [Michael Healy] who settled in Georgia and… married the slave [Mary Eliza Healy]. It was against… the laws in Georgia, but they got married. They sent their kids to a private school in New York… James went on to become the bishop of Maine [Bishop of Portland, Maine, and the first Black Catholic bishop in the U.S.] and Patrick became the president of Georgetown.” Healy was white passing being one-sixteenth black, but, by American racial standards, this made him the first African American to become a Jesuit, earn a Ph.D., and become president of a PWI—all recognitions made posthumously. In 1966, ninety-three years after Healy’s appointment, James Allen Colston became the second president of Bronx Community College, making him the first African American president of a PWI aside from Healy. Serving Bronx for a decade, Colston was previously president of Bethune-Cookman College, Georgia State College (present-day Savannah State University), and Tennessee’s Knoxville College. That same year, HistoryMaker Paul Phillips Cooke became president of District of Columbia Teachers College, an institution that emerged after Brown v. Board of Education to integrate the white and black teachers’ colleges in D.C. Cooke recalled in his 2004 interview: “After… going from an instructor to assistant professor, to associate professor, to a full professor, to an acting dean one time. I become president, September 1st, 1966… during the eight years I was president. Enrollment went from 1,250 to more than 4,000. We were attracting students to come to the Teachers College.” Top images, L-R: Patrick Healy; Georgetown College, Washington D.C., c. 1867 Bottom images, L-R: James Allen Colston; Paul Phillips Cooke Learn more: https://lnkd.in/e_q_3DMh