Early medical schools were either church-related schools affiliated with black colleges or proprietary, for-profit, schools. The First Congregational Church in Washington, D.C., figured prominently in the beginning of Howard and its medical school. Presbyterians founded a medical school at Lincoln University in 1870, and Meharry Medical College began as a division of Central Tennessee College, which had been founded by the Freedman’s Aid Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Shaw University in Raleigh, founded in 1865, was affiliated with the Baptist Church; its medical school, Leonard Medical School, began in 1882 and became the South’s first four-year medical school. Proprietary institutions (which operated as for-profit organizations) were, for the most part, established by blacks. Medical schools in this group included Louisville National Medical College, established in 1888, and the University of West Tennessee College of Physicians, founded in 1891. Today the four existing historically black medical schools are Howard University College of Medicine, Meharry Medical College, Charles Drew University of Medicine and Science in Los Angeles, and Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta.