Christopher Newport College opened in 1961 in the old John W. Daniel School building, an extension of the College of William and Mary in nearby Williamsburg. The mission was practical: serve mid-career working professionals, military personnel, and non-traditional students of Hampton Roads with night classes and a flexible schedule. In 1964 the college moved to its permanent campus on land the city of Newport News seized via eminent domain. The site was a Black neighborhood that had grown up since the early 1900s and had, over decades, gathered prosperity and stability. A 2023 ProPublica investigation documented that Newport News used eminent domain to clear Black neighborhoods for whites-only schools three times in the 1950s and 1960s; the CNU campus was one of them. The college that rose on that ground became autonomous from William and Mary in 1977 and reached university status in 1992.

Paul S. Trible Jr., a former U.S. senator from Virginia, became CNU's fourth president in 1996 and stayed for twenty-six years. He arrived determined to turn a regional commuter college into a residential liberal arts university, and he did. New residence halls went up. A neo-Georgian master plan reshaped the campus around a Great Lawn. The library was rebuilt and renamed for him and his wife Rosemary. Christopher Newport Hall opened in 2015 as a $42 million administrative landmark. By the time Trible stepped down in 2022, undergraduate enrollment had grown, the campus had expanded across previously residential blocks, and CNU had become an institution that looked nothing like the night-class extension school of 1961.

Athletics at CNU compete as the Captains, named for the man on the statue at the center of campus. The football team plays in the New Jersey Athletic Conference because the school's primary conference, the Coast to Coast Athletic Conference, does not sponsor football. The 2021-2022 academic year was the school's best ever. The women's soccer team won the NCAA Division III national championship on December 12, 2021, the school's first national title in any sport. The softball team followed on May 31, 2022, with the second. The men's basketball team made it three on March 18, 2023, the first men's national championship in CNU history. For a school that did not exist as a four-year college until 1977, this is a remarkable arc.

Randall Munroe, class of 2006, took a physics degree from CNU to a NASA contracting job and from there to drawing stick figures on the internet. His comic xkcd became one of the most widely read webcomics in the world. Cassidy Hutchinson, class of 2019, worked her way into the West Wing as an aide to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and then, in June 2022, testified before the January 6th Committee in some of the most dramatic congressional hearings in a generation. Mojo Rawley wrestled his way to WWE stardom after a brief NFL stint. American Idol finalist Chris Richardson, NBA player Lamont Strothers, and software engineer Sam Ruby all came through. A small Virginia university quietly seeds itself into surprising corners of American public life.

The neighborhood that was cleared for CNU's campus does not exist anymore, and the institution that replaced it owes its presence to a kind of municipal violence that was common across mid-century America: white-controlled cities using eminent domain to dismantle Black neighborhoods, often for highways, sometimes for schools, occasionally for both. The 2023 ProPublica reporting forced CNU and Newport News to start reckoning publicly with this history. The university has begun to research and acknowledge it. A statue of a one-armed sea captain still stands on the Great Lawn, and the question of whose ground he stands on is, finally, being asked.