The young Negro who came to call on the Reverend John Miller Dickey of Oxford, Pa. one day in 1852 had an unusual request to make. He wanted a college education so that he could go into the ministry, but though Oxford is above the Mason-Dixon Line, there was no college in the vicinity that would take him. Pastor Dickey decided that something should be done: two years later he managed to persuade the state to charter the first Negro institution of higher learning in the U.S.
This week white and Negro notables from all...