Winston-Salem State University: First in the Nation

In September of eighteen ninety-two, twenty-five students arrived at a one-room frame building in Winston, North Carolina, to begin classes at the Slater Industrial Academy. They were taught by a single instructor. The founder of the school was Simon Green Atkins, a twenty-nine-year-old educator with what contemporaries described as an audacious vision: to build an institution that prepared students in what he called the head, the hand, and the heart.

Atkins named the school after John Fox Slater, a Connecticut textile merchant whose charitable fund was helping to support Black education in the South after the Civil War. The state of North Carolina recognized the school in eighteen ninety-five and began contributing to its support, renaming it the Slater Industrial and State Normal School four years later.

In nineteen twenty-five, the General Assembly granted the school authority to award four-year degrees for training teachers of elementary grades. That made it the first Black institution in the country to hold that authority. It was, in the phrasing used at the time, the first Black teachers college in the nation.

The school went through several more name changes, becoming Winston-Salem Teachers College, then Winston-Salem State College, and in nineteen sixty-nine, Winston-Salem State University. It is today a constituent institution of the University of North Carolina system, with roughly five thousand students.

The campus sits a short distance from the factory complexes where many of its students' grandparents and great-grandparents worked at Reynolds Tobacco. The two institutions, the university and the factory, shaped Black Winston-Salem from opposite directions: one offering upward mobility and professional credentials, the other offering the industrial wages that made those credentials possible to pursue.