More than one hundred years after the founding of Bluefield State
College, the main campus remains poised high upon a hill above railroad
tracks and overlooking the town’s business district. For generations,
the children of Black families living largely in southern West Virginia
earned college degrees from this small teacher’s college.
However in the past three decades, the local Black community
together with middle-aged and elderly Black alumni have watched this
formerly all-Black residential college transform into a predominantly
White commuter school with community college offerings.
For Susie Guyton, a 1953 graduate of Bluefield State College, the
national alumni association meetings used to be a time for rekindling
ties with former classmates and other alumni. But last month when
members of the Bluefield State College national alumni association
returned to their alma mater, they found a campus that, for the first
time in its 103-year history, has no Black faculty members.
“I’m very disappointed with the way the school is turning out,” Guyton says.
Bluefield State offers what many believe to be the starkest example
of a public historically Black institution losing its original identity
to the demands of desegregation (see chart on pg. 18 for a listing of
The Ten Whitest HBCUs). Despite their traditional mission, several
public historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) around the
country have come under court orders or state legislative mandates to
become integrated institutions. Bluefield State, with an enrollment of
more than 2,500 students, had just 177 Black students this past school
year, making it the Whitest HBCU in the nation.
Changing the Course of History
Desegregation began at Bluefield State in the 1950s, when White
Korean War veterans started attending the school. The college is one of
two historically Black institutions in West Virginia. The other, West
Virginia State College (WVSC), located in Kanawha County, still has a
Black president and several Black faculty — but it too has become
predominantly White. Under state mandates, Bluefield State has grown
from less than a thousand students in the 1960s, when it was
predominantly Black, to more than 2,500 students now.
