The corner-stone of Dillard University will be laid tomorrow and work will begin at once on five buildings to be erected at an approximate cost of one half million dollars.
The new University will be located on a special seventy acre tract of land located in the historical city of New Orleans, La.
Down at Dillard University young men and women will be trained to take their places in most of the branches of higher education as they are now trained at Howard, Fisk and Atlanta Universities. This new university for Negroes represents the merging of New Orleans University, Straight College and the Flint Gooridge Hospital, and will open its doors to students during the fall of 1935, with Dr. W.W. Alexander, Director of the Commission on Internal Cooperation, as first president.
Dillard University will accomplish a long felt need in making higher education possible at a university for Negroes and will join with Howard, Atlanta and Fisk in sending forth more doctors, lawyers, and journalists and other professionals to administer to the 12,000,000 Negroes in this country.
The movement is a stride forward and is worthy of much praise.
Less than twenty-three years ago the Negro in New Orleans was just a "beast of burden" and so regarded. Today interested white citizens of the South have placed at his disposal one of the largest and finest institutions of its kind in America.
Negroes of the nation are grateful to the American Missionary Association, the Board of Education of the Methodist Episcopal Church and the Rosenwald Fund which jointly made the project possible.
And Negroes of Charlottesville are happy and proud that this new center of higher education for Negroes will carry the name of one who has done so much in interest of Negro Education and one who may be called a fellow citizen-Dr. James Hardy Dillard.