The land came from a daughter who remembered. Sometime before 1830, a white Georgia man named Samuel I. Cabell moved to the Kanawha Valley and married Mary Barnes, a woman who had been enslaved. They had thirteen children. Cabell knew Virginia law, knew what would happen to his family if he died, and took elaborate legal precautions: he officially emancipated Mary and their children in 1858, structured his will to preserve their inheritance. He was murdered shortly after the Civil War. Two decades later his daughter Maria Cabell-Hurt sold part of the property to the new state of West Virginia, because Black students still had to cross the Ohio River to find a college that would take them. The West Virginia Colored Institute opened on her family's land in 1892. The Cabells are buried on the campus.
The school was one of the 19 original land-grant institutions for Black students created by the second Morrill Act of 1890, which forced segregated states to provide separate higher education for African Americans or forfeit their federal land-grant money. West Virginia chose the Kanawha Valley site, opening in May 1892 with three faculty - President James Edwin Campbell, Byrd Prillerman, and T.C. Friend - and over 40 students. The curriculum mixed agriculture, mechanical arts, and what was then called domestic science. Teacher education followed in 1893, military training in 1899. Booker T. Washington had helped pick the location and spoke at the first commencement. In 1909 he recommended Byrd Prillerman as president. Under Prillerman the school became the intellectual center of Black West Virginia.
President John Warren Davis served for 34 years and remade the institution. He persuaded Carter G. Woodson - the historian later called the father of Black history, the founder of Black History Month - to come to Institute as Academic Dean from 1920 to 1922. The school became West Virginia State College in 1929 and earned accreditation in 1927. Among the alumni of those decades were Katherine Johnson, the NASA mathematician whose calculations sent John Glenn into orbit; Earl Lloyd, the first African American to play in the NBA; saxophonist Chu Berry; jazz drummer Butch Miles; Charles Calvin Rogers, who would earn the Medal of Honor in Vietnam. A statue of Katherine Johnson now stands next to the Cole Complex. Earl Lloyd has a statue inside the Walker Convocation Center and the street outside has been renamed Earl Lloyd Way.
Most HBCUs stayed predominantly Black after Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. West Virginia State did not. Located in a region with a relatively small Black population and a larger white one, the college absorbed thousands of new white students using the G.I. Bill. By the late 1950s the student body had flipped. President William J. L. Wallace adopted the motto A Living Laboratory of Human Relations and called the transition a tribute to the character and courage of the people of Kanawha Valley. The cost came in 1957 when the West Virginia Board of Education ended the matching state funding for land-grant status, and the school effectively lost its federal designation. Restoring it took 44 years, the persistent advocacy of Senator Robert C. Byrd, and a 2001 act of Congress.
The athletic teams are the Yellow Jackets, competing in NCAA Division II's Mountain East Conference since 2013. During segregation, the school played other HBCUs as West Virginia in the Colored Intercollegiate Athletic Association. After desegregation it renamed itself West Virginia State to avoid confusion with West Virginia University and joined the previously all-white WVIAC. The Marching Swarm is the only corps-style marching band at any HBCU, an unusual choice in a tradition dominated by show-style bands. As of 2017 the campus is 75 percent white and 8 percent Black, an unusual demographic profile for an HBCU. The institution continues to negotiate what it means to be historically black and presently mixed - and what it owes to the family whose land made it possible.
Located at 38.38 N, 81.77 W in Institute, West Virginia, about 7 miles west of Charleston along the Kanawha River. Yeager Airport (KCRW) is about 12 miles east. The campus sits on a flat river terrace easy to spot from the air. Best viewed at 3,000-5,000 feet on clear days, with the Kanawha River below tracing the valley.