Stillman College: One Hundred and Fifty Years

Charles Allen Stillman was the pastor of First Presbyterian Church of Tuscaloosa when he conceived, in eighteen seventy-five, a school for the training of Black men for the ministry. He had watched the post-Civil War landscape of the South and concluded that the shortage of educated Black clergy was one of the most consequential gaps in the rebuilding of Black communities. The General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States authorized his plan and Tuscaloosa Institute held its first classes in eighteen seventy-six.

The institution grew. It added a junior and senior high school, a junior college program accredited in nineteen thirty-seven, and between nineteen thirty and nineteen forty-six, a hospital and nurse training school for a community underserved by every other medical institution in the area. In nineteen forty-eight it became Stillman College.

Three years later it graduated its first baccalaureate class. In nineteen fifty-three it received full accreditation from the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools. Condoleezza Rice, who would serve as National Security Advisor and then Secretary of State under President George W.

Bush, spent a portion of her childhood on the Stillman campus. Her father John Rice became the college's dean of students in nineteen sixty-six and the family lived on campus in a brick house behind the dormitories. Condoleezza was eleven years old when they arrived and attended what was then Central High School.

It is a detail of biography that Tuscaloosa does not always lead with, but it is documented and specific. Stillman College remains on its original campus, a hundred and five acres in Tuscaloosa, still Presbyterian-affiliated, still predominantly Black, still accredited, still operating one hundred and fifty years after a pastor decided that what the post-war South most needed was educated ministers and that Tuscaloosa was where he would start.