Kittrell College — Ninety Years of Black Education in the Segregated South, Ended by Debt and Fire

Summary

Kittrell College, in the small Vance County town of Kittrell, North Carolina, founded in 1886 by the African Methodist Episcopal Church, graduated its last class in 1975 and was disbanded shortly after. It had stood, through closures and reopenings, for eighty-nine years. It was a historically Black institution built and sustained by a Black church in the segregated South, and for most of its life it did the work such institutions existed to do: it gave African American students in North Carolina a place to be educated when the state's white colleges would not have them — training teachers, ministers, and artisans, and later offering two years of college credit to young people whose options were otherwise closed.

The college was the creation of the AME Church and the determination of the people it served. Chartered in 1885 and opened in 1886 as the Kittrell Normal and Industrial School, it was founded to train African American youth as teachers and tradespeople, added ministerial work after a rechartering in 1899, and took the name Kittrell College in 1901. It survived on the thin resources a Black denomination could marshal in the Jim Crow South — tuition, church collections, and the labor of its faculty — and that thinness showed early: financial trouble forced it to close from 1934 to 1937 and again in 1948, before it reopened in 1953 as a combined high school and junior college. The last high-school class graduated in 1965; thereafter it was a two-year college serving roughly four hundred students in its final years.

The end came from the conjunction of long-standing financial fragility and a sequence of disasters in the 1970s. In 1972 a fire destroyed three of the four buildings the college had acquired decades earlier from Duke University — including the B. N. Duke Library — gutting the physical heart of the campus; a second fire struck in 1973. The college faced an investigation into the misallocation of federal funds and could not raise enough to clear its debts. An institution that had always operated near the edge of solvency could not absorb that combination. The last class graduated in 1975, with enrollment at 396, and the school closed.

What was lost was not measured only in students and buildings. Kittrell College was an instrument the Black community of North Carolina had built for itself across nearly a century — a place that conferred dignity and opportunity in a society organized to deny both, that produced teachers for segregated schools and leaders for segregated towns, and that stood as proof of what a Black church could sustain on almost nothing. Its closure removed one of the institutions the segregation era had made necessary and that its end had not made expendable. The campus did not vanish: in 1979 its facilities became the Kittrell Job Corps Center, which still trains young people on the grounds where a Black college once stood.

Timeline

A Church Builds a College for Its People

Kittrell College was an act of self-determination by people the South had decided not to educate. In the years after emancipation, the African Methodist Episcopal Church — the oldest independent Black denomination in the United States, founded by free Black Americans who had walked out of a segregated white congregation — set about building schools across the South for a population the white states largely refused to teach. The North Carolina Conference authorized funds in 1885, chartered a school at Kittrell in Vance County, and opened it in 1886 as the Kittrell Normal and Industrial School. Its purpose was as practical as the moment demanded: to train African American young people as teachers and artisans, the professions through which a freed people could build schools, churches, and trades of their own.

The school grew within the limits its circumstances allowed. A rechartering in 1899 broadened its work into post-secondary and ministerial training, and in 1901 it took the name Kittrell College. From the beginning it combined study with labor, offering a two-year course students could complete as a terminal vocation or carry as credit toward a bachelor's degree elsewhere. Its most visible inheritance came in the 1920s, when Benjamin N. Duke — whose family fortune was rebuilding Trinity College into Duke University — paid to have older Trinity buildings dismantled in Durham and reassembled at Kittrell, giving the small Black college a library and academic buildings it could never have financed on its own. The B. N. Duke Library was dedicated in October 1929. For a denomination operating on church collections and tuition in the depths of Jim Crow, those buildings were a rare gift, and they would stand at the center of the campus for more than four decades.

What Kittrell built, it built for a community that had few other places to turn. In the segregated South, the white colleges of North Carolina were closed to Black students by law and custom, and the public provision for Black higher education was meager. An AME college like Kittrell was therefore not a redundancy but a necessity — one of the institutions through which African Americans educated their own teachers, ministers, and skilled workers, and acquired credentials segregation otherwise withheld. Its graduates carried that education back into Black schools and towns across the state. That is the weight of what Kittrell was: not merely a small junior college, but a community's instrument of survival and advancement, sustained for nearly a century on resources that would have closed a less determined institution many times over.

A Fragile Endowment Against a Hostile Century

The fragility that finally ended Kittrell was present from the start, because the resources available to a Black church college in the Jim Crow South were never adequate to the work. Kittrell lived on tuition its students could barely afford, on collections gathered across AME congregations, and on the underpaid labor of its faculty; it had nothing resembling the endowment that cushions a college against a bad year. The consequence was a history of interruption few institutions could have survived. Financial problems forced Kittrell to close entirely from 1934 to 1937, and again in 1948 — twice shuttered for want of money before the modern era of federal aid. Each time the church and community reassembled it, and in 1953 it reopened as a combined high school and junior college, the form in which it would finish its life. The last high-school class graduated in 1965, leaving Kittrell a two-year college of a few hundred students.

That a college could close twice and reopen twice measures how badly its community wanted it to exist — and how little stood between Kittrell and the end at any given moment. An institution with no reserve is one disaster away from closing, and in the early 1970s the disasters came in sequence. The structural problem — a Black junior college with no endowment, dependent on tuition and church support, competing against newly desegregated public institutions that could offer more for less — was the slow erosion. The fires and the financial inquiry were the acute shocks an eroded institution could no longer withstand. Kittrell had survived the Depression and the lean postwar years by the narrowest of margins each time. It would not survive the 1970s.

The Five Factors

Aftermath

The closure removed one of the institutions a Black community in North Carolina had built across nearly a century to educate itself, and its loss was felt as such. The students of its final years had to look elsewhere — to the desegregated public colleges and the state's other historically Black institutions — to continue educations Kittrell could no longer offer. The faculty and staff, many of whom had given their working lives to a college that paid little and asked much, lost the institution that had defined their vocation. And the AME Church lost one of the schools through which it had carried its mission into the segregated South, a college it had founded, reopened twice, and finally could not save.

The campus was repurposed rather than abandoned. In 1979 its facilities became the Kittrell Job Corps Center, a federal residential program that has trained young people on the site for more than four decades, so that grounds the AME Church consecrated to Black education still serve a public educational purpose. Alumni interest in reviving Kittrell surfaced periodically in the years that followed, but the college was not reopened. What endures is the record of what Kittrell did: for eighty-nine years, against the full weight of a segregated society and on resources that should not have sufficed, it educated the teachers, ministers, and workers of a people the South had tried to keep illiterate. That is a legacy a fire could not destroy and a closure did not erase.

Lessons

References

• Kittrell College Wikipedia
• Kittrell College NCpedia
• Kittrell College is Founded African American Registry
• Kittrell College is looking toward a new life The Henderson Dispatch