Discover the impact of University of the District of Columbia, a community-focused HBCU in the heart of Washington D.C. The University of the District of Columbia is historic and modern, all at the same time. Public higher education in the District is rooted in the school for “colored girls” that Myrtilla Miner founded in 1851 in Washington, D.C., which came to be called the Miner Normal School. Washington Normal School, a school for white girls established in 1873, was renamed Wilson Normal School in 1913, after James O. Wilson, Washington’s first superintendent of public schools. In 1929, Congress enacted a statute that converted both normal schools into four-year teachers colleges. For several years, Miner Teachers College and Wilson Teachers College were the only institutions of public higher education in the city. After the landmark U.S. Supreme Court school desegregation decision, Brown v. Board of Education (U.S. 1954), the two colleges merged in 1955 to form the District of Columbia Teachers College. Over the next decade, D.C. residents petitioned for an expansion of higher education that would provide training for careers other than teaching. In 1966, Congress enacted the District of Columbia Public Education Act, which established Federal City College and Washington Technical Institute.