In 1924, Coolidge became the first U.S. president to give a commencement address at a Black college — an HBCU (Historically Black College or University).
His decision to speak at Howard University was not random. It was paired with two other aspects of his administration. First, his speech was linked to his successful efforts to increase the number of African-American students who would study medicine. The Coolidge administration effected an increase in the number of Black physicians in the United States: this meant an increase in the number of Blacks who moved from the lower class to the middle class by studying for a white-collar, college-educated profession, as historian Kurt Schmoke writes:
The 30th president, Republican Calvin Coolidge, was a major supporter of Howard University and an overlooked figure in advancing the cause of racial equality in the United States. In one of his earliest acts as president, Coolidge proposed and persuaded Congress to pass an appropriation bill that reinforced the unique relationship between Howard and the federal government.
Secondly, Coolidge’s landmark speech at Howard’s graduation ceremonies was linked to his 1924 election campaign. While Coolidge took a clear stand in rejecting the KKK and promoting anti-lynching laws, his opponent, the Democratic Party’s nominee for the presidential contest, was left to defend his party’s platform, which equivocated on racial questions, and failed to clearly reject the Klan.
Coolidge’s presence on Howard University’s campus, located in Washington, D.C., also symbolized a continuity between Coolidge and his predecessor, President Warren Harding. Like Coolidge, Harding had also been a civil rights advocate and a champion of anti-lynching laws, as a report from the Coolidge Foundation notes:
President Calvin Coolidge is known for many things, including his championing of limited government, his deft handling of the 1919 Boston Police Strike, and his responsible stewardship of the federal budget. But how often do we recall his pioneering gestures to improve race relations in the fraught decade of the 1920s?
The 1920s were fertile years for civil rights in the United States. Preceded by the racist and segregationist Wilson administration (1913 to 1920), and followed by FDR’s neglect of African-American concerns (1933 to 1945), the years of Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge were years in which Blacks gained both political liberty and a concrete move into the middle class.
