History
Following the American Civil War, William Mahone (1826–1895) of Petersburg, Virginia was the driving force in 1870 to combine the Norfolk and Petersburg, South Side and the Virginia & Tennessee railroads to form the Atlantic, Mississippi & Ohio Railroad (AM&O). The new line extended from Norfolk to Bristol. After the AM&O struggled to operate for several years under receiverships, the railroad was sold at auction in 1881 and became part of the Norfolk and Western Railway.
Mahone, a former Confederate general, led Virginia's Readjuster Party. He was a major proponent of public schools for the education of freedmen and free blacks. Elected by the state legislature as a United States Senator from Virginia, he arranged for the proceeds of the AM&O sale to help found a normal school for black teachers near Petersburg. Alfred W. Harris, a black attorney who was a state delegate, introduced the bill that established the institute. In 1882, the Virginia Normal and Collegiate Institute at Ettrick was established.
| “ | "The next morning I asked my father about the school for coloured people, which was being projected under the influence of General Mahone at Petersburg, now a State Normal School. He told me much about it. It was to open the following fall. The Hon. John M. Langston, he said, a coloured man who was as well educated as any white person that he knew of, was to be the president. He said I might go if I wished and that he would do what he could to help me. It being a state school, and he having certain strong friends in the Republican Party (General Mahone among them), Hon. B.S. Hooper, a member of Congress from the Fourth Congressional District of Virginia, would probably arrange for me to have a scholarship." | ” |
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—Dr. Robert Russa Moton |
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Virginia State's first president was John Mercer Langston, former dean of Howard University's law school, and later elected to Congress as the first African-American Representative from Virginia (and the last until 1972). The board of trustees was composed of prominent African-American men, with one seat for a white man. Until the mid-1960s, following federal civil rights legislation that ended racial segregation, the faculty of the collegiate program and the normal school was exclusively African American.
In response to the 1890 Amendments to the federal Morrill Act, Virginia designated the normal school as one of its land grant colleges. The United States Congress required that states either open their land-grant colleges (supported by all taxpayers) to all races or else establish additional land-grant educational facilities for blacks. Following the Reconstruction era, white Democrats had regained power in the Virginia state legislature (and across the former Confederacy); they had established Jim Crow racial segregation in public facilities, including schools and colleges.
In 1902, the legislature revised the school's charter and renamed it the Virginia Normal and Industrial Institute. With expansion of programs and a four-year curriculum, in 1923 the college was renamed Virginia State College for Negroes, shortened to Virginia State College in 1946.
In 1979, the institution's addition of more departments and graduate programs was recognized in a change of name to Virginia State University. Meanwhile, the school's two-year branch in Norfolk, founded in 1935, was expanded to a four-year curriculum and renamed Norfolk State College. Following additional expansion of programs, it is now Norfolk State University.
| The third season of BET's reality television series College Hill was filmed at Virginia State University in 2006. |
In 2003, the university accepted its first students in its first Ph.D. program.
On July 1, 2010, President Keith T. Miller was named as the 13th president of Virginia State University. He previously served as President of Lock Haven University. Miller earned his bachelor, master and doctoral degrees from the University of Arizona.
Read more about this topic: Virginia State University
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“A man acquainted with history may, in some respect, be said to have lived from the beginning of the world, and to have been making continual additions to his stock of knowledge in every century.”
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