LeMoyne-Owen College

Historical Note

LeMoyne was founded in 1871 by the American Missionary Association as a primary and normal school for training freedmen. It continued to function primarily as a teacher training school until the 1930s, when it became a four-year college. In the late 1960s, it merged with S.A. Owen Junior College of the Tennessee Baptist Church to become LeMoyne-Owen College, a coeducational, non-sectarian but Christian-church affiliated liberal arts college.

In 1862, Lucinda Humphrey, under commission from the AMA, opened a school for contrabands of the Civil War behind Union lines near Memphis. She later relocated the school into the city. The AMA built Lincoln Chapel as both a church and school in 1866, operating it alternately with the city. The Lincoln Chapel school was replaced in 1871 by the LeMoyne Normal and Commercial School, funded by a donation of Dr. Francis Julius LeMoyne, a Washington, Pennsylvania, physician. By his stipulation, the school was non-sectarian, open to all colors, sexes, and classes, and intended for practical training.

In 1901, LeMoyne Normal Institute opened the first secondary school for African Americans in Memphis. The school moved to its present site in 1914, during the tenure of Principal Ludwig Larson. After a study on the need for an African American college in the area, President E. J. Ortman began the junior college program in 1924, which was accredited by the state in 1930 and permitted to grant teacher certificates.

After a second study by President Frank Sweeney in 1932 on the need for a local African American college, LeMoyne eliminated primary and secondary classes and became a four-year college. It was accredited by the state at the end of the first school year. The Southern Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools designated LeMoyne an "A"-rated college in 1935.

In 1943, Hollis F. Price became LeMoyne's first African American president. The school merged with S.A. Owen Junior College in 1968, which had opened fourteen years earlier in 1954. The decade of the 1970s saw the tenures of president by Odell Horton (1970) and Walter Walker (1974).

Abstract:

American Missionary Association archives 1969 addendum

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