Fayetteville State and the Seven Men Who Built a School

On November twenty-ninth, eighteen sixty-seven, seven Black men signed a deed and paid one hundred thirty-six dollars for two lots on Gillespie Street. They were purchasing land where a school could be built.

The men were David Bryant, Nelson Carter, Andrew Jackson Chesnutt, George Grange, Matthew Leary Junior, Thomas Lomax, and Robert Simmons. They had all been enslaved. Some had purchased their own freedom. All of them understood that education was the foundation of everything else.

The school they established, with help from the Freedmen's Bureau, was called Howard School, named for General Oliver Otis Howard, the Bureau's first commissioner. It opened to teach Black children at a time when most of the South was doing everything it could to keep Black children out of schools.

In eighteen seventy-seven, the North Carolina General Assembly took notice and selected Howard School as a teacher training institution for African Americans, renaming it the State Colored Normal School. It was a grudging acknowledgment that came with strings, but it was also state funding and state commitment, and the school grew.

By the time it became Fayetteville State Teachers College, then Fayetteville State University, it had a century of graduates behind it, many of them teachers who spread across North Carolina to educate generations of Black students in segregated schools that were, so often, the only schools that would have them.

Today Fayetteville State University is the oldest public historically Black university in North Carolina and one of the oldest in the country. It sits on Murchison Road, and its founding is inseparable from those seven men who paid one hundred thirty-six dollars for the chance to build something that would outlast all of them.