Wayland Seminary

Wayland Seminary (WS) was a historically black seminary and college affiliated with the Baptist Church. Located in the nation’s capital, it operated from 1867 until 1899. WS opened its doors to students in 1867, but its founding may be traced to the establishment two years earlier, in 1865, of the umbrella institution of which it was a constituent part: the National Institute of Theology (NIT).

The NIT was founded in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War by the American Baptist Home Mission Society to provide a seminary education for newly freed African Americans in order to supply ministers for black congregations within the American Baptist Church movement. WS was named after Francis Wayland (1796–1865), a pastor of the First Baptist Church in America—founded in 1638 in Providence, Rhode Island, by Roger Williams. Wayland was also a prolific author, a President of Brown University, and an abolitionist.

By 1867, the NIT had set up three seminaries: Augusta Institute in August, Georgia; Richmond Theological Seminary in Richmond, Virginia; and Wayland Seminary in Washington, DC. Augusta Institute was later transferred to Atlanta, and eventually became Morehouse College. In 1899, WS merged with Richmond Theological Seminary to create Virginia Union University, which still operates under that name as a historically black college in Richmond.

Among WS’s most distinguished alumni are the following:

• Henry V. Plummer (1844-1905)—American Baptist minister; chaplain to the US Army’s all-black cavalry (“Buffalo Soldier”) regiments
• Booker T. Washington (1856-1915)—orator, author, and educator; a founder of the National Negro Business League; founder of the Tuskegee Institute
• Kate Drumgoold (born c. 1858-?)—author of the autobiography, A Slave Girl’s Story (1898)
• Adam Clayton Powell, Sr. (1865-1953)—American Baptist minister, author, and community activist; pastor of Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church, at that time the Protestant church with the largest congregation in the US (c. 10,000)
• Alfred L. Cralle (1866-1919)—businessman, entrepreneur, and inventor; received a US patent in 1897 for his idea for an ice cream scoop with a built-in scraper; general manager of the Afro-American Financial, Accumulating, Merchandise and Business Association