North Carolina Central and the Black Legal Pipeline

James Edward Shepard was born in Raleigh in eighteen seventy-five, the son of a minister. He went to Shaw University, worked as a pharmacist, and spent years trying to establish a school. In nineteen ten, he succeeded. The National Religious Training School and Chautauqua opened in Durham with Shepard as its president and a mission to train Black students in a state where they were excluded from most of the alternatives.

The school went through several names: the National Training School in nineteen fifteen, the Durham State Normal School in nineteen twenty-three when the state took it over, the North Carolina College for Negroes in nineteen twenty-five, the North Carolina College at Durham in nineteen forty-seven, and finally North Carolina Central University in nineteen sixty-nine. Through all of those names, it stayed in Durham and it stayed focused on what the surrounding society was trying to deny its students.

In nineteen thirty-nine, North Carolina Central opened a law school. It was the second law school at a historically Black college or university in the country, after Howard University. The timing was not coincidental. The legal fight for civil rights was entering a critical phase. Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund needed lawyers. They needed lawyers who understood the law and understood what segregation felt like from inside it.

North Carolina Central law graduates staffed courtrooms and law offices across the South during the decades when the legal architecture of Jim Crow was being dismantled case by case. They are not the names most people associate with that dismantling. They are the infrastructure beneath the names.

The university today enrolls roughly ten thousand students. The law school still operates in Durham.