Knoxville College

Knoxville College, established in eighteen seventy-five by the United Presbyterian Church of North America, was founded to educate formerly enslaved people and their children in East Tennessee. It was one of a wave of schools that Northern churches planted across the South in the years after the Civil War, and for decades it was among the few places where Black Tennesseans could earn a college degree. The campus, a cluster of Victorian brick buildings on a hill above the Mechanicsville neighborhood just northwest of downtown Knoxville, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places as a historic district. The college struggled financially through much of the twentieth century and lost its accreditation, has a tiny enrollment, and has repeatedly suspended classes, but preservation efforts and alumni groups are working to stabilize and repurpose the buildings, which remain one of the most intact Reconstruction-era Black educational campuses in the country.