Analyzing the circumstances surrounding the creation and development of the Atlanta University System, this book shows how philanthropists' positive involvement created a unique higher educational center for black Americans that exists nowhere else in the nation.

"The story of black higher education in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the leaders that envisioned it and the philanthropists that supported it is a complex one that needs to be told. Thank you, Vida L. Avery, for telling it so well!" Beverly Daniel Tatum, President, Spelman College, USA