He bought it with the Bureau's money
The head of the Freedmen's Bureau used Bureau funds to buy the campus of the university named after him. Then the university sold him an acre of it, cheap, and he built a house on it. The house is still there.
Howard University, ca. 1900. Collected by W.E.B. Du Bois for the American Negro Exhibit at the Paris Exposition. Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-40466.
Howard University was chartered by an act of Congress on March 2, 1867. It remains the only historically Black university in the country established by federal charter.
It is named for Major General Oliver Otis Howard, who at the time was commissioner of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands — the Freedmen's Bureau.
Howard did not simply lend the school his name. According to the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture and the Library of Congress alike, he used Freedmen's Bureau funds to purchase the land and construct several of the original campus buildings, including the first main building and the old medical school. The original campus was three acres.
Before it closed, the Bureau channeled more than $500,000 to Howard University between 1867 and 1872.
The acre
In 1867, the university sold General Howard an acre of that campus below market value.
He built a house on it. Second Empire style, mansard roof, carved dormers. It went up the same year the university was chartered.
It is called Howard Hall. Of the four buildings erected during the founding phase of the university, it is the only one still standing — a National Historic Landmark, the oldest surviving building on campus.
From 1869 to 1873, Howard also served as the university's third president.
So the sequence runs: federal funds bought the ground, the ground was named for the man who spent the funds, the man bought a piece of the ground back at a discount, built a house on it, and then ran the institution.
He was asked about it
This is not a modern reinterpretation. It was an issue at the time.
Howard came under congressional scrutiny for having started the university with Bureau money and then accepting land from it below market value. Thousands of dollars were unaccounted for in the Bureau's ledgers, and Democrats in Congress demanded that the commissioner repay what they alleged had been misappropriated.
The scrutiny is part of the record. So is the university.
Both things are true
It would be easy to write this as a scandal and easy to write it as philanthropy, and neither would be accurate.
Oliver Otis Howard directed enormous public resources toward Black education at a moment when the political will to do so was collapsing — he spent millions of Bureau dollars on schools before the Bureau was dismantled in 1872. Howard University produced Charlotte Ray, Thurgood Marshall, Toni Morrison, Ralph Bunche, Vernon Jordan, Kamala Harris.
And he bought a discounted acre of it and lived on it.
Both of those are the same story. The institution was built with federal money by a man who was also, personally, a beneficiary of the transaction, and it has been arguing with the federal government about money ever since.
When the Bureau died in 1872, the money stopped completely. Howard University received no federal funds at all until 1879, when Congress began granting it a small annual appropriation.
That appropriation still exists. It is a line item, negotiated every year, in the budget of the United States.
Sources: National Museum of African American History and Culture, "The Freedmen's Bureau: New Beginnings for Recently Freed African Americans" · Library of Congress, "Today in History: November 20" · Encyclopedia of African American Culture and History, Howard University · National Register of Historic Places nomination, General Oliver Otis Howard House (NRHP #74002163, NHL designated May 30, 1974) · HistoryNet, "Oliver Otis Howard: Westward, Christian Soldier."
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