Paine College: A Biracial Experiment in Eighteen Eighty-Two
Near Augusta, Georgia
When the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church and the Methodist Episcopal Church South sat down together in eighteen eighty-two to found a college for freed Black people in Augusta, the collaboration was unusual enough that historians still note it. Two Methodist bodies, one historically Black and one historically white Southern, agreed that church-related higher education was the mechanism of advancement, and they put their institutional weight behind a joint institution they named after Bishop Robert Paine.
Classes began in eighteen eighty-four in rented space at Tenth and Broad Street in downtown Augusta. By eighteen eighty-six the college moved to what was then rural land outside the city limits. The campus today sits on sixty-four acres in the heart of what is now central Augusta.
The original mandate was ambitious and simple: prepare young Black people who had been systematically excluded from formal education by law for more than two centuries to compete, lead, and teach. The institution moved gradually from secondary instruction to full college-level work, changing its name from Paine Institute to Paine College in nineteen oh three.
The college today remains affiliated with the United Methodist Church and the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church. It is small, historically Black, and still operating on the same campus that was farmland when the founders broke ground. The founding partnership, a formal biracial agreement to build an institution in the immediate aftermath of slavery, was not common. In eighteen eighty-two Augusta, it was remarkable.
