Baltimore Normal School for the Education of Colored Teachers collection

The Baltimore Association for the Moral and Educational Improvement of the Colored People was organized in 1864 by forty-six men committed to opening schools for Maryland's Black population. On January 9, 1865 the organization opened its first Baltimore school, under the direction of Leander Waterman, at the African Baptist Church in Crane’s Building located at the corner of Calvert and Saratoga Streets. By the end of 1865, six more schools had been opened in the city and eighteen in the counties.

In 1867 the property at the corner of Courtland and Saratoga Streets, formerly the Friends' Meeting House, was purchased by the Association with help from the Freedmen's Bureau, English Quakers, and others in order to develop a Normal School "for the education of young colored men and women as teachers for their own race." "Normal" came from the French ecole normale and the Prussian normal schools that influenced American educators to establish norms or standards for the training of teachers.

In 1908, after repeated petitions from the Board of Trustees of the Baltimore Normal School for the Education of Colored Teachers, the state legislature authorized the Board of Education to assume control of the school and re-designated it as Normal School No. 3. By 1910, the state purchased a 187-acre tract formerly known as Jericho Farm and relocated the school to Bowie in Prince George's County, Maryland. In 1914, the school was renamed the Maryland Normal and Industrial School at Bowie and then renamed again in 1938 as the Maryland Teachers College at Bowie.

The school became Bowie State College in 1963 following the establishment of a liberal arts program and in 1988 it joined the newly formed University System of Maryland as Bowie State University.