Lincoln University Football Team. A 1923 vintage photo taken in the stadium after playing Howard University in Philadelphia. The final score was 6-6, as noted in pencil on the reverse.
Founded as Ashmun Institute by Rev. John Dickey, a Presbyterian, and his wife, Sarah Cresson, a Quaker, in 1854, and renamed Lincoln University in 1866, the it became the first degree-granting historically black college or university (HBCU) in the nation.
In 1894, Lincoln began fielding a football team that played Howard University in a rivalry that for many years was described by sportswriters as “the football classic of the Negro educational world.” For much of the 1920s, a visit by Howard’s team sparked many social events, and this was particularly true when they met Lincoln every Thanksgiving Day.
In 1924, sportswriter W. Rollo Wilson referred to the Hampton, Howard, Lincoln trio as the “Big Three” of black football, having the same significance for blacks as the Harvard-Yale and Army-Navy games had for whites. Indeed, the Thanksgiving game formed the hub of a contest between the black populace of Washington, DC, and that of Philadelphia to determine what one reporter termed “the social center of the Negro universe.”