Qualla: West Virginia State University

West Virginia State University: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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.

West Virginia State University: Founded by the Second Morrill Act

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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...

West Virginia State University: The Golden Years and Carter G. Woodson

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 Wes...

West Virginia State University: The Strangest Desegregation

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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...

West Virginia State University: The Yellow Jackets and the Marching Swarm

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 Virgi...