Framingham State University in Massachusetts has announced that it will names a new dormitory after its first African American graduate. Mary Miles Bibb graduated from the Massachusetts State Normal School in Lexington in 1843. The school later became Framingham State College and later Framingham State University.
Bibb was born in Rhode Island in 1820. After graduating from what is now Framingham State, she taught in several schools. In 1847, she married Henry Bibb, an escaped slave. The couple moved the Canada due to the Fugitive Slave Act, where they became educators, journalists, and leading voices of the abolitionist movement.
After the Civil War, Bibb returned to the United States and settled in Brooklyn, New York. She died in 1877.
Today Framingham State University enrolls about 6,000 students. African Americans make up 10 percent of the undergraduate student body.
