100 Years of Black Scholarship at America’s Most Prestigious Women’s College

In 1925, Zora Neale Hurston arrived in New York City to collect two second place literary prizes in Harlem. She dazzled the crowd including Barnard College founder Annie Nathan Meyer. Meyer was a progressive woman who, 40 years after Barnard’s first class, was searching for the perfect candidate to be Barnard’s first Black student. Together the two made history.

For 100 years, Barnard has educated generations of intelligent, trailblazing, altruistic Black alumni. Through racial quotas and student revolutions, affirmative action and threats of co-education, gender liberation and attacks on academia, Black Barnard students, faculty, and staff have created community, pioneered fields, and founded enduring legacies. Forging their own emancipation, Black Barnard pushed the college to be more inclusive in its admissions, imaginative in its education, and innovative in its contributions to women and the world. 

Through archival footage and over 40 interviews with alumni, faculty, and staff, BLACK AT BARNARD tells the story of the Black women who pushed Barnard College, the brainy underdog of the Seven Sisters colleges, to fulfill its promise: a rigorous college in New York City for the education and advancement of all women.

Directed by Nia Ashley with generous support from the Barnard College Library Archive.