Berea College: The School That Defied Kentucky

Just off the interstate, the town of Berea sits quietly at the edge of the Appalachian foothills. But Berea College, founded here in eighteen fifty-five, was anything but quiet. It was the most radical institution of higher learning in the antebellum South.

The college was the idea of abolitionist minister John Gregg Fee, who believed that God had, in his words, 'made of one blood all peoples of the earth.' He built a one-room school on a donated lot, recruited teachers with ties to Oberlin College in Ohio, a great antislavery stronghold, and opened the doors to students of any race, either gender, and any economic class. In a slave state, this was a revolutionary act. Pro-slavery neighbors eventually ran Fee and his faculty out of Madison County at gunpoint in eighteen fifty-nine. They returned after the Civil War.

In eighteen sixty-six, Berea enrolled ninety-six Black and ninety-one white students, operating as a genuinely integrated college in the South decades before such a thing was common. That changed in nineteen oh four, when Kentucky state legislator Carl Day introduced the Day Law: a statute explicitly prohibiting interracial education in any private Kentucky institution. Berea fought it all the way to the United States Supreme Court. In nineteen oh eight, the court ruled against them, with Justice John Marshall Harlan dissenting in stinging terms, as he had done in Plessy v. Ferguson a decade before.

Forced segregation held until nineteen fifty, when Kentucky quietly amended the Day Law. And so Berea went back to what it had always been.

Today the college still charges no tuition. Every student works on campus in exchange for a full scholarship. That policy dates to the beginning. John Fee believed education should never be locked behind money. A hundred and seventy years later, Berea is still proving the point.