Benjamin Franklin Bowles (1869–1928),[1] commonly written as B. F. Bowles, was an African American civil rights leader, teacher, high school principal, and the founder and president of Douglass University, a 20th-century college for African Americans in segregated St. Louis, Missouri.
Benjamin Franklin Bowles was born on a farm near Cooperville in Pike County, Ohio.
[4] In 1921, Bowles signed an NAACP petition as a representative in Missouri, in support of the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill.
[5] Bowles founded Douglass University in St. Louis in 1926, which he operated until the late 1920s due to a decline in his health.
At the time of the university's founding, no other college in St. Louis County admitted black students.