Johnson C. Smith: Built in the Rubble of War

On April seventh, eighteen sixty-seven, two years after the Civil War ended and less than two years after the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery, a meeting convened at the old Charlotte Presbyterian Church. The Catawba Presbytery was there, and so were two men who make for an unlikely founding partnership: Samuel C. Alexander, a Presbyterian pastor, and Willis L. Miller, a former enslaver and Confederate soldier who had fought in the war against the United States.

Together they established what they called the Biddle Memorial Institute, a school for the formerly enslaved people of Mecklenburg County, who made up roughly forty percent of the county's population and who had been legally forbidden from learning to read. A woman named Mary D. Biddle donated fourteen hundred dollars to the enterprise and the school was named for her late husband, Henry Jonathan Biddle, a Union officer who had died in battle in eighteen sixty-two.

The founding was complicated from the beginning. A former Confederate founding a school for freedpeople was not an act of liberation but of paternalism, and the school's curriculum reflected Presbyterian missionary priorities as much as community need. But it opened. It taught. People came from throughout the Piedmont who had been denied education under penalty of law.

In eighteen seventy-six the school became Biddle University. In nineteen twenty-three a woman named Jane Smith made a major gift, and the institution was renamed Johnson C. Smith University in memory of her late husband. It has operated continuously since eighteen sixty-seven.

Today Johnson C. Smith is Charlotte's only historically Black college or university, a one-hundred-acre campus overlooking Uptown, and the institution that produced some of the city's most consequential civil rights leaders, among them J. Charles Jones, who organized the nineteen sixty lunch-counter sit-ins.