However, the earliest documented claim to such a title was Livingstone's 1906 team, led by captain Benjamin Butler "Ben" Church.

The CAAC's initiative was fostered by Paul Jones, who reported the champion annually in his column in Spalding's Intercollegiate Football Guide.

[5] The first prominent game between an HBCU and predominantly white institution occurred in the 1948 Fruit Bowl when Southern defeated San Francisco State, 30–0.

[6] Five years later, HBCUs began to gravitate over to the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA) because it offered numerous athletic competition options, was oriented primarily toward smaller institutions, and had also begun openly welcoming schools of varying demographic backgrounds as members.

However, designating an annual black national champion has remained a popular tradition, even as HBCUs have successfully challenged majority white schools for football championships for decades now, within the framework of both NCAA and NAIA competition; this includes Associated Press, United Press International, NCAA, and NAIA-sponsored titles for the 1962, 1973, 1978, 1990, 1992, and 1995 seasons, as well as runner-up finishes in 1963, 1983, 1991, 1994, and 2012.

Winston–Salem State (2012) has achieved the best single-season win total of 14 (with their only loss being in the NCAA Division II national championship game).

Attempts have been made over the years to determine a non-mythical national champion with an actual football game contested by leading teams among HBCUs throughout the United States.

[22] However, with Tennessee State being a member of the Ohio Valley Conference (OVC), the Celebration Bowl could not fully represent all HBCUs within the NCAA's Football Championship Subdivision.

Notes: *—the Pelican Bowl (played 1972 and 1974–75) and Heritage Bowl (played 1991–99) were intended as black national championship games matching the outright champions or top-seeded co-champions of the MEAC and SWAC conferences, but in practice the top seeds often declined their automatic bids to participate in the NCAA playoffs instead—only the 1972, 1975, and 1994 games matched the top seeds of both conferences as originally intended, although the Pelican Bowl is known to have been promoted as a black national championship game all three seasons[99][100][101][102][103][104] (in 1991, however, the Heritage Bowl's committee intentionally issued the MEAC's bid to its second-seeded co-champion,[105] because one of the top-seeded co-champion's conference wins had been determined by a forfeit, instead of on the field);[106] **—the Steel Bowl/Vulcan Bowl (played after the 1940–48 and 1951 seasons) is known to have been promoted as a black national championship game after the 1940 and 1941 seasons [276]