4 - Wilberforce University

Summary

From all directions the rail lines into Xenia, Ohio, brought visitors to the doorstep of Wilberforce University, the oldest institution of higher learning owned by an African American institution and entirely led by African American administrators. At the Xenia station, students who could afford to dip into their college money might call for a carriage to take them on the last stage of their travels, but most of the new arrivals at Wilberforce came on foot, uphill across the mile-long track that led from the Wilberforce rail station to the university campus. Indeed, Wilberforce administrators intended it to be this way. They prized the moral power of the moment when new students caught first sight of the main building, capped by its cupola rising ninety-two feet above the graceful table-land on which the college was situated. The climb to the college evoked the image of a higher ground—intellectual, moral, and spiritual—to which Wilberforce students were now ascending.

In the fall of 1892, Jennie Johnson joined the new class arriving at the college, fired with ambition and inspired by the school's mandate to “make Christian scholars not mere bookworms, but educated workers with God.” Johnson's sojourn among the African Methodist Episcopal elite at Wilberforce would be a mixed blessing. The making of an “educated worker with God” in the Wilberforce model went well beyond any theological training Johnson could have hoped to gain closer to home.