Institute: West Virginia's Black Land-Grant College

The small community of Institute, just west of Charleston, exists largely because of a federal law and a deliberate act of racial exclusion.

In eighteen ninety, Congress passed the Second Morrill Act, requiring states that received federal land-grant funds to provide equal access to education, or to create a separate institution for Black students. West Virginia chose the latter. The West Virginia Colored Institute was founded in eighteen ninety-one and opened here in May of eighteen ninety-two, offering courses in agriculture, mechanical arts, domestic science, teacher education, and military science. In nineteen twenty-seven, it became the first Black land-grant college in the country to earn regional accreditation.

The school grew through a series of name changes, Collegiate Institute, then State College, then West Virginia State University in two thousand four. After desegregation in nineteen fifty-four, it became one of the few historically Black colleges to also serve a majority non-Black student body, a legacy of its unusual position as both an HBCU and a public land-grant institution.