Howard University is a historically black college in Washington, D.C. It was established by a congressional charter in 1867, and much of its early funding came from the Freedmen's Bureau.

Howard University has played an important role in civil rights history on a number of occasions. After being refused admission to the then-segregated University of Maryland School of Law, a young Thurgood Marshall enrolled at Howard instead. There he studied under Charles Houston, a Harvard Law School graduate and leading civil rights lawyer who at the time was the dean of Howard's law school. Houston took Marshall under his wing, and the two forged a friendship that would last for the remainder of Houston's life and forever change America.

In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson delivered a speech to the graduating class at Howard, where he outlined his plans for civil rights legislation. A decade earlier, Howard University was the site where Thurgood Marshall and his team of legal scholars from around the nation prepared to argue the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case.

Howard has graduate schools of law, medicine, dentistry, and divinity, in addition to the undergraduate program. The current enrollment (as of 2003) is approximately 11,000, including 7,000 undergraduates.