Berean Institute

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1992

Stephen Girard's 1831 will founded a school for poor white orphan boys, and for more than a century that racial restriction stood. Beginning in the 1930s, attorney Raymond Pace Alexander challenged it, and lawyer Cecil B. Moore later carried the fight into the federal courts. A 1968 ruling finally opened Girard College to students of all races, making its walls a landmark of the modern civil rights struggle.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2021

In the early 20th century, a small circle of Black students at Howard University founded Omega Psi Phi in 1911 — the first fraternity established at a historically Black college or university — and Dr. Oscar James Cooper was among them. He carried that founding energy home to Philadelphia, where he practiced medicine for half a century and helped launch the Pyramid Club, a hub of Black professional and cultural life. The house here served as both his residence and his medical office, anchoring him in the community he served.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1990

In 1964, in the unlikely setting of an abandoned Philadelphia jailhouse, Rev. Leon H. Sullivan opened the first Opportunities Industrialization Center to train Black workers for skilled jobs that discrimination had long kept beyond their reach. Born of the same organizing energy as Sullivan's earlier 'selective patronage' boycotts, O.I.C. paired vocational instruction with dignity and self-reliance, and the model spread from this city to hundreds of centers across the nation and eventually overseas.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1991

This building has worn many identities across a century and a half—first the home of famed tragedian Edwin Forrest, then the Philadelphia School of Design for Women, and later Heritage House. In 1968 it became the Freedom Theatre, a community-rooted Black theater dedicated to professional training in the dramatic arts. Amid the era's civil-rights ferment, it gave African-American performers a stage and a school of their own.