Miles College, Education Born from a Saddlebag
Near Birmingham, Alabama
Miles College sits in Fairfield, just west of Birmingham, and its story begins the way a lot of historically Black institutions began in the post-Reconstruction South: with almost nothing, a determined group of people, and a church.
The Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, now called the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church, organized Miles Memorial College in eighteen ninety-eight. The name honored Bishop William Henry Miles, a bishop of the CME denomination who had died six years earlier. The campus started small, a handful of buildings on borrowed ground, training teachers for the Black schools of Jefferson County at a time when the state of Alabama was spending roughly nine dollars on a white child's education for every dollar it spent on a Black child.
What made Miles distinctive in the nineteen sixties was not its size but its positioning. The college sat at the edge of Birmingham's Black community, and when the civil rights movement arrived in the city, Miles became a place where students organized. Faculty members helped prepare students for demonstrations, and the campus served as an intellectual base for people thinking through the tactics and philosophy of nonviolent direct action.
In nineteen sixty-three, the year of the Children's Crusade and the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing, Miles students were part of both the protests and the grief. The college was small enough that students knew one another across class years; what happened in Birmingham felt personal to everyone on campus.
Today Miles is a four-year liberal arts institution with roughly one thousand six hundred students, still affiliated with the CME church, still rooted in Fairfield. It is accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, and it holds the distinction of being the only college whose president served in the pulpit of a church that was bombed during the civil rights era. That president was Lucius Pitts, who led Miles from nineteen sixty-one to nineteen seventy-one, and who was in Birmingham for all of it.
