Stillman College: Six Students and a Mission

In the fall of eighteen seventy-six, a small building in Tuscaloosa, Alabama opened its doors to exactly six students. The institution had no alumni, no endowment, and no official name beyond a working title, the Tuscaloosa Institute. What it had was a clear, urgent purpose.

The school was the vision of the Reverend Doctor Charles Allen Stillman, a white Presbyterian minister from Tuscaloosa who persuaded the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States to authorize a training school for Black ministers in eighteen seventy-five. Stillman believed that the South's freedmen needed educated leaders of their own, men who could preach and counsel from within their communities rather than relying entirely on outside missionaries. The first six students were all men preparing for the ministry. The school's motto was simple: saving souls and mending bodies.

It was a fragile beginning in a hostile environment. Reconstruction was collapsing around it, and Alabama in the eighteen seventies was not a welcoming place for Black higher education. The school survived anyway. It became coeducational in nineteen twenty-two when a women's dormitory was built, and its junior college program earned accreditation in nineteen thirty-seven. The institution was eventually renamed Stillman College in honor of its founder.

Today Stillman is a four-year liberal arts institution affiliated with the Presbyterian Church USA and certified by the United Negro College Fund. Its campus sits near downtown Tuscaloosa, not far from the University of Alabama, making it one of the most visible HBCU presences in a major college town. It has produced ministers, educators, and civic leaders across the South for nearly a century and a half. A long way from those first six students in a single room.