Fayetteville State University

Overview

Fayetteville State University is a public historically Black university in Fayetteville, North Carolina, the second-oldest state-supported school in the state, tracing its roots to the Phillips and Sumner Schools founded in Fayetteville’s African American community immediately after the Civil War in 1865. In 1867 those schools consolidated to form the Howard School, following a vision of Freedmen’s Bureau chief General Oliver O. Howard, on land donated by seven prominent African American men — Matthew N. Leary, Andrew Jackson Chesnutt, Robert Simmons, George Grainger, Thomas Lomax, Nelson Carter, and David A. Bryant — who together paid $136 for two lots on Gillespie Street and formed a self-perpetuating board of trustees to maintain the property. In 1877, an act of the North Carolina legislature made the Howard School the state’s first teacher-training institution for African Americans, redesignating it the State Colored Normal School — the first state-sponsored institution for training Black teachers in the South.