Claver College was a Black Catholic university in Guthrie, Oklahoma, founded by the Benedictine Sisters of St. Joseph's Monastery in Tulsa.
Claver College was founded in 1933 by Sr Joseph O'Connor, a Benedictine religious sister from St. Joseph's Monastery in Tulsa, to serve the African American population of Guthrie, Oklahoma.[1][2] The college was supported with funding from Katharine Drexel (who had founded Xavier University of Louisiana, the nation's only Catholic HBCU, in 1925).[3] The college was named after Peter Claver, a Jesuit missionary and the patron saint of African-American ministry.[4]
The college, a night school, operated out of a building that also hosted a grocery store.[5] It ceased operations in 1944, and its former place of operation, the floodplain neighborhood of "Little Africa", was later destroyed. It has since experienced sustained restoration efforts.[6] The school is scheduled to be included in an upcoming book from Dr. Katrina Sanders, “The Rise and Fall of Black Catholic Education in a Changing South, 1886-1976”.[7]