Qualla: Agricultural and Technical College of North Carolina Historic District

Agricultural and Technical College of North Carolina Historic District: Introduction

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Upstateherd, CC BY-SA 3.0. Four young men from this campus walked downtown on February 1, 1960, sat at the F.W. Woolworth lunch counter, and changed the South. Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair Jr. (later Jibreel Khazan), and David Richmond were all freshmen at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, which everyone in Greensboro just calls A&T. The historic core of their campus - a 10.1-acre district along Dudley Street with five Classical and Colonial Revival buildings - was added to the National Register of Historic Places on October 20, 1988. The district preserves the oldest surviving structures of the first and largest public land-grant college for Black North Carolinians, an institution that has spent more than a century producing the engineers, agriculturalists, and educators who have made it the most influential HBCU in the state.

Image: Upstateherd | CC BY-SA 3.0

Agricultural and Technical College of North Carolina Historic District: Born of a Law Meant to Exclude

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Upstateherd, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Second Morrill Act of August 30, 1890 told the southern states a hard thing: open your existing land-grant colleges to Black students, or build separate ones. North Carolina chose to build separate. On March 9, 1891, the state legislature established the Agricultural and Mech...

Image: Upstateherd | CC BY-SA 3.0

Agricultural and Technical College of North Carolina Historic District: Stone and Brick in the Classical Tradition

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Upstateherd, CC BY-SA 3.0. The five contributing buildings of the historic district are Colonial Revival and Classical Revival - architecture that announced civic seriousness in the early 1900s, the same vocabulary used at Duke University and at North Carolina Central in Durham. Noble Hall was the first ma...

Image: Upstateherd | CC BY-SA 3.0

Agricultural and Technical College of North Carolina Historic District: Murphy, Dudley, Harrison

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Upstateherd, CC BY-SA 3.0. Murphy Hall, built in 1924, opened as the university's first cafeteria. It now houses the office of student affairs. The building wears its origins on its facade: a pedimented three-bay entrance pavilion, rusticated brick door surround, full-height brick pilasters with stone capi...

Image: Upstateherd | CC BY-SA 3.0

Agricultural and Technical College of North Carolina Historic District: The A&T Four

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Upstateherd, CC BY-SA 3.0. On February 6, 1960, more than 1,400 A&T students met in Richard B. Harrison Auditorium - the same Harrison Auditorium that anchors the historic district today - to vote on whether to continue the sit-ins that four of their classmates had started five days earlier. They voted yes...

Image: Upstateherd | CC BY-SA 3.0

Agricultural and Technical College of North Carolina Historic District: What the District Preserves

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Upstateherd, CC BY-SA 3.0. The historic district sits along Dudley Street between Bluford Street and Arthur Headen Drive, with an elliptical paved driveway that served as the traditional main entrance and a 1.5-acre lawn buffering the buildings from the street. The shape is irregular because the campus its...

Image: Upstateherd | CC BY-SA 3.0