This article examines the relationship between gender and leadership in southern public Black colleges from the late nineteenth through the early twentieth century. Public colleges offer a unique view of this relationship because, in an era of disfranchisement, the political stakes of leadership were more obvious than in private schools. I argue that the gap between Black women's dynamic roles on public campuses and their marginalized representations in school reports reveals the processes that have obscured their public educational leadership in the American South. Analysis of images collected from college catalogs supplements my examination of documentary evidence from archives and published reports. State educational administration was one of the few remaining spaces where Black men could wield political influence. As they worked to produce institutional images that proclaimed their capacity for and right to public leadership, however, they minimized the contributions of Black women.

In 1890, Congress passed the Second Morrill Land-Grant Act, which provided federal resources to support the creation of nineteen Black land-grant colleges. At a historical and political moment when Black Americans faced a violently repressive backlash against what progress they had achieved during Reconstruction, the successful passage and implementation of this legislation was unlikely. How did congressional lawmakers successfully pass the Morrill Land-Grant Act of 1890, and was the expansion of educational opportunity for African Americans a clearly expressed objective? Using historical analysis of primary sources, this analysis suggests that the 1890 legislation’s investment in Black colleges reflected a politically expedient compromise between northern Radical Republicans who supported greater educational access for Black citizens and Southern Democrats who wished to expand higher educational opportunity in their region while also maintaining the segregated racial order of southern educational institutions.