Washington, District of Columbia · Founded 1851 · Felix the Firebird
“The nation's only urban land-grant university — DC's public HBCU, teaching the city since 1851, from a six-student classroom for Black girls to the Firebirds of Van Ness.”
Highlight reel of the Firebirds' championship basketball era — the 1982 national title team of Britt and Jones.
The 38th annual commencement at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center, with the U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security as speaker.
Full UDC-TV broadcast of the 2016 commencement convocation from the Walter E. Washington Convention Center.
The College Tour episode following a UDC student-athlete balancing pro soccer dreams with youth advocacy in D.C.
The College Tour segment on a UDC student pursuing justice advocacy — the school pitches its pipeline from workforce credentials to doctoral and law degrees.
The law school's own intro: a public-interest school whose students provide 90,000 hours of legal services to low-income D.C. residents each year.
UDC-TV panel of D.C. activists and scholars on C.L.R. James, who taught at Federal City College (later UDC) from 1969 to 1980.
The College of Arts and Sciences' own tour of its programs, small classes and hands-on research across Washington.
Independent admissions explainer walking through UDC's programs, campus life and what applicants should know before applying.
Senior guard Erin Senegal's 2015–16 Lady Firebirds season highlights, cut for her pro recruiting reel.
Full-game stream of the January 30, 2019 ECC matchup, re-uploaded by a fan from UDC's own broadcast.
An opponent's highlight reel from a game against the Lady Firebirds — the other sideline's view of UDC.
1904 graduate of Miner Normal School #2 (UDC predecessor), first in his class; 'The Grandfather of Black Basketball' — founded the first African American athletic league (1906) and taught generations of Washington youth including Duke Ellington and Charles Drew. UDC commissioned his statue and named its sports complex for him.
Miner Normal School alumna; the first African-American woman in the U.S. to earn a PhD in mathematics (Catholic University of America, 1943); taught at Miner and shaped math education in D.C. public schools.
6'6" forward on the 1982 NCAA Division II national championship team; tournament Most Outstanding Player and the school's first male All-American (with Earl Jones); played briefly in the NBA.
6'10" forward on the 1982 championship team and 1983 runners-up; All-American; played briefly in the NBA; later nominated to the NCAA's 50th Anniversary Elite Eight All-Tournament Team.
Former Firebird who became a Harlem Globetrotter; the E.B. Henderson Sports Complex displays his Globetrotters jersey in the arena's trophy area.
UNVERIFIED — several outlets report she attended UDC before Georgetown law; she became the first African-American chief judge of the U.S. District Court for D.C. (1980–2001) and presided over the Clinton-Lewinsky investigation phase. Attendance could not be confirmed against a UDC source.
UNVERIFIED — third-party alumni aggregators list him as a UDC student in the early 1990s; he became a respected NBA.com journalist until his death in 2021. Not confirmed against a UDC source.
UNVERIFIED — per his own video biography, he studied political science/business at UDC; dunk pioneer, pastor and author whose UDC years included a publicized NCAA eligibility controversy he calls 'Illegal Dunks.' Sourced from the video's own description, not a UDC record.
On December 3, 1851, abolitionist and educator Myrtilla Miner opened the Normal School for Colored Girls in a rented 14-foot-square room of a frame house owned by African American Edward Younger, starting with just six students. It was the first normal school in the District of Columbia and the fourth in the nation, built to train young Black women as teachers. Racist opposition was immediate and violent — local mobs formed against it, and Mayor Walter Lenox argued education would make Black residents a 'restless population.' Backed by benefactors including Henry Ward Beecher and his sister Harriet Beecher Stowe — Stowe gave $1,000 from Uncle Tom's Cabin sales — the school survived until the Civil War forced it closed. UDC traces its founding to this school and calls Miner its 'founding mother.'
The District opened a parallel teaching school for white girls, the Washington Normal School, in 1873 — the segregated counterpart to Miner's school. It was renamed the James Ormond Wilson Normal School in 1913. Meanwhile Miner's reopened school became the Miner Normal School in 1879 and joined the D.C. public school system that year. The two schools would operate on parallel, segregated tracks for more than 80 years before being forced together.
Edwin Bancroft Henderson graduated first in his class from Miner Normal School #2 in 1904, a UDC predecessor institution. At Miner he met his future wife of 66 years, Mary Ellen Meriwether, and was mentored by physical training director Anita J. Turner, who steered him to Harvard's Dudley Sargent School of Physical Training. Henderson went on to spend 50 years teaching Washington's Black youth — including a young Duke Ellington and Charles Drew — and became known as 'The Grandfather of Black Basketball,' founding the first African American athletic league, the Inter-Scholastic Athletic Association (1906). UDC later commissioned his statue and named its sports complex for him.
In 1929 the United States Congress elevated both normal schools to four-year teachers colleges — Miner Teachers College for African Americans and Wilson Teachers College for white students. The act gave the District's Black and white teacher-training traditions formal collegiate status, still strictly segregated. It would take the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education ruling a quarter-century later to undo that split.
Martha Euphemia Lofton Haynes, an alumna of the Miner Normal School, earned her PhD in mathematics from the Catholic University of America in 1943 — the first African-American woman in the United States to earn a doctorate in mathematics. She taught at Miner and spent decades shaping math education in Washington's public schools. Her achievement remains one of the proudest citations in UDC's institutional memory, proof of what the school's 19th-century classrooms were built to produce.
On July 1, 1955, following the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision, Miner Teachers College and Wilson Teachers College were desegregated and merged into a single District of Columbia Teachers College. The merger ended a century of separate Black and white teacher training in the capital. D.C. Teachers College became the city's oldest teacher-training institution and, two decades later, one of the three schools folded into UDC.
On November 7, 1966, the District of Columbia School Reform Act — sponsored by Senator Wayne Morse and Representative Ancher Nelsen — was enacted as Public Law 89-791, creating two brand-new institutions: Federal City College, a four-year liberal arts college, and the Washington Technical Institute, a technical school. Each was granted land-grant status with a $7.24 million endowment in lieu of a land grant. The schools were designed to serve the city's needs directly and aim resources and knowledge at solving urban problems. D.C. residents had petitioned for years for affordable higher education beyond teacher training, and this act was the answer.
Both schools opened in 1968. Federal City College was originally planned as a small, selective college of about 700 students, but applications soared to 6,000 and some 1,400 students were placed by lottery — the city was starving for a public college. The Washington Technical Institute set up in the former National Bureau of Standards buildings at Van Ness, after the bureau vacated them. Federal City College took Mt. Vernon Square as its site, and in 1973 took control of the Carnegie Library there.
The Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools granted accreditation to the Washington Technical Institute in 1971 and to Federal City College in 1974 — remarkably fast for institutions only a few years old. Even in their infancy, the three D.C. public colleges were already being eyed for a bigger structure: a single comprehensive university for the nation's capital.
The first of the new Washington Technical Institute buildings at Van Ness were dedicated in 1973, the start of a campus designed in the New Brutalist style by a joint venture of Bryant & Bryant and Ellerbe Architects. Ten new buildings would go up over several years. The campus sits on 20 acres at Connecticut Avenue and Van Ness Street NW in North Cleveland Park — the same ground UDC occupies today, and the reason the Van Ness–UDC Metro station carries the name.
After Congress granted limited home rule to the District, D.C. Law 1-36 (1975) authorized the mandate to consolidate the three schools — D.C. Teachers College, Federal City College, and Washington Technical Institute — into one university. A new UDC Board of Trustees took office in May 1976: 11 members appointed by the Mayor, three appointed by student communities, and three by the alumni associations. The board assigned Federal City College president Wendell P. Russell and WTI president Cleveland L. Dennard to jointly build the single institution, and in February 1977 formed 22 task forces to work out every detail.
On August 1, 1977, the Board of Trustees publicly announced the consolidation of the District of Columbia Teachers College, Federal City College, and Washington Technical Institute into the University of the District of Columbia under a single administrative structure. On the same day the board appointed Lisle Carleton Carter Jr. as the university's first president. Under Carter, the academic pieces were merged into five programmatic colleges: Business and Public Management; Education and Human Ecology; Liberal and Fine Arts; Life Sciences; and Physical Science, Engineering and Technology. The District finally had its comprehensive public university.
The 1982 UDC men's basketball team, coached by Will Jones, won the NCAA Division II National Basketball Championship — the HBCU's first and only national title. The Firebirds finished the regular season 25-2 and played a run-and-gun style that writers called synonymous with the hard-nosed basketball identity of the city itself. Explosive 6'6" forward Michael 'P-Bird' Britt was named the tournament's Most Outstanding Player, and he and 6'10" power forward Earl Jones became the first All-America male athletes in school history. UDC beat Florida Southern in the final, and both Britt and Jones later played briefly in the NBA.
Led again by Britt and Jones, the Firebirds came within a hair of repeating as national champions, falling to Wright State in the 1983 Division II title game and finishing as national runners-up. The back-to-back final appearances remain the high-water mark of UDC athletics. Decades later, both Britt and Jones were nominated to the NCAA's 50th Anniversary Men's Elite Eight All-Tournament Team, alongside names like Earl Monroe, Jerry Sloan and Walt Frazier.
The Trinidadian historian, journalist, Marxist and pan-Africanist C.L.R. James taught at Federal City College — later part of UDC — from 1972 to 1980, living in Washington through those years. His work became a staple of subaltern studies and postcolonial literature, and UDC's own cable channel later produced a panel of D.C. activists and scholars on his legacy. English professor Paul Cooke also taught at the university for 22 years and directed several of its plays. The school's early faculty carried real intellectual weight.
The Council of the District of Columbia passed legislation merging the District of Columbia School of Law with the University of the District of Columbia in 1996. The school traced itself to the Antioch School of Law, founded in 1972 by Edgar and Jean Cahn as a clinical, public-interest law school. Edgar Cahn stayed on as a Distinguished Professor of Law at UDC. The school was later renamed the David A. Clarke School of Law for the former D.C. Council chairman, and its students now provide some 90,000 hours of legal services a year to low-income D.C. residents.
In a fiscal crisis, the university eliminated its intercollegiate athletics program to help close an estimated $18.4 million budget shortfall; interim president Julius Nimmons had already proposed cutting 125 faculty and 168 staff positions. But the students refused to let the Firebirds die. A student referendum voted to raise athletic fees from $25 to $75 a semester, generating over $1.1 million a year for sports. At the May 24 commencement on Dennard Plaza, Board Chair Michele V. Hagans announced: 'Our financial crisis forced us to eliminate our intercollegiate athletic program... Therefore, the Firebirds will rise again from the ashes next season.' Men's and women's basketball, tennis and track, men's soccer and women's volleyball all came back.
Beginning with the 2009–10 academic year, UDC's programs were divided under an umbrella 'university system' setup. A new Community College of the District of Columbia (UDC-CC) assumed the associate's degrees, certificates, continuing education and workforce development programs with open enrollment, while the flagship kept only bachelor's and graduate programs. A high school diploma no longer guaranteed admission to the flagship. The split was a direct response to a six-year graduation rate of just 7.9% — the city wanted the flagship to become selective while the community college kept the open door.
In August 2010, UDC — historically an all-commuter school — opened its first residential accommodations by leasing an apartment building across the street from the Van Ness campus. The university announced plans for a new on-campus residence hall for up to 300 students. For a school where generations of students had scattered after class, having students actually live on the yard was a cultural shift.
In late 2012 the university reported spending $35,152 per full-time student — 66% more than comparable schools — and moved to cut costs hard: 97 full-time-equivalent positions were eliminated across 2012 and 2013, and in December 2012 the board installed Rachel Petty as interim COO. At the same time, construction began on a $40 million student center at Connecticut Avenue and Van Ness, designed to LEED Platinum standards, championed by then-Council Chairman Vincent Gray. The message was austerity and investment at once: cut the bloat, build the flagship.
Interim president James E. Lyons Sr., hired in spring 2013 to lead strategic planning, unveiled his Vision 2020 plan in 2015: eliminate the NCAA athletic program and slash 23 low-enrollment academic programs, arguing the university 'can no longer attempt to be all things to all people.' Students and faculty erupted — four public forums, a packed rally in the main plaza, student surveys, and walk-on lacrosse player Donnel Jones, the student body president, organizing the opposition. The board voted to axe 17 majors (including sociology, economics, history and physics) but dropped the athletic cuts entirely. On February 18 the plan passed with athletics intact: 'intercollegiate athletics continues at the University of the District of Columbia and there is no pending action to discontinue this program.'
Under president Ronald Mason Jr. and his 'Equity Imperative,' UDC relaunched doctoral programs in 2019 with PhDs in Computer Science & Engineering and in Urban Leadership & Entrepreneurship — the school's first doctorates in years. The same year it launched the District of Columbia's Institute of Politics Policy and History. In 2020, responding to the George Floyd protests, the university launched the Institute for the Study and Elimination of White Supremacy. Mason expanded UDC's footprint with campus extensions across the District, and in 2021 U.S. News ranked the school 59th among Regional Universities North for social mobility.
Maurice D. Edington, previously executive vice president and chief operating officer at Florida A&M University, was named president of the University of the District of Columbia in 2023, succeeding Ronald Mason Jr. He inherited a school marking its 175th year (counted from Miner's 1851 founding), a Van Ness campus mid-transformation, and the standing mission of being the District's anchor institution. His stated priorities: expanding access, accelerating student success, and building a world-class public university for the capital.
The university marked 175 years with its UDC175 celebration: the 49th commencement in May 2026 honored more than 840 graduates, with longtime environmental stewards Dennis and Zandra Chestnut recognized for decades of community service. That fall, President Edington opened the academic year with the convocation theme 'UDC Belongs to the District,' telling more than 1,000 new students that 'we were created to serve the people of the District and to place an excellent, affordable education within reach.' The D.C. Council also honored UDC athletics trailblazer Bessie Stockard with a ceremonial resolution that summer. The Firebirds continue in NCAA Division II's East Coast Conference.
UNVERIFIED as a formal rivalry — but the crosstown basketball meetings are documented. In the early 1980s the run-and-gun Firebirds regularly faced Howard across town; HBCU historian Herbert Seward's account of the 1982 title team describes Michael Britt going up for a finish 'against crosstown rival Howard University.' No trophy series or named game found in any source checked. UDC's current East Coast Conference foes (Daemen, Molloy, Queens, Bridgeport) are conference opponents, not historic rivals.
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All nine NPHC organizations hold recognized chartered chapters at UDC — one of the few schools that can say that — listed by name in the university's own student handbook and Greek Letter Organizations guidelines. Greek organizations march in the Fall Opening Convocation processional alongside Mr. and Miss UDC, the Royal Court, student government and athletes, a visible part of the school's ceremonial life. As a largely commuter campus, Greek life is one of the anchors of student community; the law school also runs its own NPHC affinity group, Greeks at Law. Chapters must maintain at least five enrolled student members with a 2.5 cumulative GPA under university policy.
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The Washington Technical Institute set up its campus in the buildings vacated by the National Bureau of Standards at Van Ness, after the District received jurisdiction of the property from the General Services Administration in 1972. The federal government's old science buildings became the city's technical college.
The first of the new campus buildings at Van Ness were dedicated in 1973, designed in the New Brutalist style by a joint venture of Bryant & Bryant and Ellerbe Architects. Ten new buildings would rise over several years — the concrete campus UDC still occupies.
Following the 1975 consolidation announcement, construction of Buildings 32, 38 and 39 was completed in 1976. Today they house engineering and mathematics (32), business and student services (38), and administration, financial aid and the registrar (39).
Seven additional buildings opened in 1981 at the conclusion of a second phase of construction, completing the planned Van Ness campus. The old D.C. Teachers College facilities at 11th and Harvard Streets NW and at the Franklin School were retired.
UDC opened its first residential accommodations in August 2010 by leasing an apartment building across the street from the Van Ness campus — a milestone for a school that had always been all-commuter. The university also announced plans for a new on-campus residence hall housing up to 300 students.
The renovation of the campus plaza deck was completed in fall 2011, part of the first wave of capital improvements under the new campus master plan aimed at fixing years of deferred maintenance.
Construction began in 2012 on a $40 million student center at the intersection of Connecticut Avenue and Van Ness Streets NW, designed to LEED Platinum — the highest sustainability designation. Then-Council Chairman Vincent Gray personally moved the project through the council. The student center was meant to give a commuter campus a real center of gravity.
In January 2019 UDC leased property near its Van Ness campus as part of its ongoing project to improve campus infrastructure, extending the university's footprint in the neighborhood.
The 2020–2029 campus plan set the next decade's agenda: renovating academic buildings for more efficient space, greening the campus with new green roofs, and identifying two sites for future student housing — a building conversion on Van Ness Street NW and new construction over the tennis courts at the Windom Place entrance. The university also purchased the building at 4250 Connecticut Avenue NW.
The FY2024 capital budget timeline funded interior renovations and a new addition at the Bertie Backus facility, construction of a new addition at the Firebird Farm research farm in Beltsville, Maryland, main library renovations, and continued Van Ness window, roof, mechanical and IT modernizations. The farm gives UDC's agriculture and environmental science programs a working research site outside the city.
The central plaza at Van Ness — Dennard Plaza, carrying the Dennard family name — became the university's ceremonial ground: commencement ceremonies, student rallies (including the 2015 athletics protests), and the 'Firebirds rise again' announcement were all staged there.
The university's home arena, the E.B. Henderson Sports Complex, is named for 1904 Miner Normal School graduate Edwin Bancroft Henderson, 'The Grandfather of Black Basketball.' Inside, the 1982 National Championship banner hangs alongside a display honoring former Firebird and Harlem Globetrotter Charles 'Choo Choo' Smith and a statue of Henderson himself outside the doors.
The faculty's most famous name is C.L.R. James, the Trinidadian historian and pan-Africanist who taught at Federal City College from 1972 to 1980. English professor Paul Cooke taught and directed plays at the university for 22 years. Edgar Cahn, co-founder of the Antioch School of Law, serves as a Distinguished Professor of Law. In athletics, Bessie Stockard was honored by the D.C. Council in 2026 with a ceremonial resolution for a trailblazing career in athletics, education and mentorship at UDC.
In office since 2023; previously EVP/COO at Florida A&M.
President's chief of staff at the Van Ness campus.
Leads academic affairs; previously Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.
Leads the public-interest law school.
Leads the open-admissions community college arm.
Leads engineering and applied sciences.
Leads the university's research enterprise.
Leads student development and success.
Commands the UDC Police Department, a full-service force with arrest authority on all UDC property.
Led the Lady Firebirds to a fifth straight ECC Championship berth in 2025–26.
UDC has always been largely a commuter school — students come from across the District, take classes, and head home — which is why the 2010 dorms and the student center mattered so much: they gave Firebird Nation a place to actually gather. The student body is heavily D.C.: the university graduates more District resident students than any other college in the city. Fall 2023 demographics ran about 54% Black and 28% Hispanic, with a meaningful international contingent. Tuition stays low for D.C. residents (around $6,000 in-state), and the DC Futures program can add up to $8,000 in scholarships. The Felix Grant Jazz Archives — 45,000 LPs, 10,000 CDs, tapes and 78s donated by the jazz broadcaster — live in the university library, a quiet point of pride.