Elizabeth City State University: Founded by One Vote

In eighteen ninety-one, Hugh Cale, an African American legislator from Pasquotank County, sponsored the bill that created what would become Elizabeth City State University. Cale was one of the last Black state legislators North Carolina would send to Raleigh for nearly a century, and his bill passed by a single vote. When the school opened in January of eighteen ninety-two, it had twenty-three students, two teachers, rented quarters, and a budget of nine hundred dollars.

It was called the Elizabeth City State Colored Normal School, training Black teachers for the state's segregated schools. Through a century of growth it became a four-year teachers college in nineteen thirty-seven and a university in nineteen sixty-nine. Today it is part of the University of North Carolina system.