Qualla: Bluefield State University

Bluefield State University: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Forty students gathered for the first class of the Bluefield Colored Institute in 1895, on a steep four-acre site just north of the Norfolk and Western tracks. The West Virginia Constitution at the time prohibited racially integrated public education, and Bluefield, in Mercer County, sat within a hundred miles of seventy percent of the state's African American residents. The institute that opened that year is now Bluefield State University, the only one of America's historically Black colleges and universities where Black students became a minority on their own campus after desegregation. The story of how that happened — and what it cost — is the story of the school.

Bluefield State University: Mahood Hall and the Terraced Hills

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The institute's first principal was Hamilton Hatter. The first president of the board of regents was Nathan Cook Brackett, an abolitionist who had earlier served as the first president of Storer College in Harpers Ferry. State Senator William Mahood, a Mercer County Republican, h...

Bluefield State University: From Institute to State College

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 1932 the State of West Virginia accredited the education curriculum and changed the name to Bluefield State Teachers College. In 1943 a further accreditation and curriculum expansion produced the simpler Bluefield State College. Henry Dickason, an institute alumnus, served as ...

Bluefield State University: The Bomb and What Followed

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

After the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, Bluefield State began admitting white students. By the late 1960s, African American students were protesting that the administration was deliberately transforming the school from a residential historically Black college into a ...

Bluefield State University: A Residential Campus, Again

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 2003 the West Virginia Legislature created a new community college system. Bluefield State was required to transfer all of its two-year programs, except engineering and nursing, to the newly created New River Community and Technical College — and lost roughly half of its enrol...