Johnson C. Smith University

Overview

Johnson C. Smith University is a private historically Black university in Charlotte, North Carolina, affiliated with the Presbyterian Church (USA), established April 7, 1867, as the Biddle Memorial Institute at a meeting of the Catawba Presbytery in the old Charlotte Presbyterian Church, funded by a $1,400 donation from Mary D. Biddle and named for her late husband, Henry Jonathan Biddle, who had died of wounds from the Battle of Glendale in 1862. Renamed Biddle University by an 1876 legislative charter change, the school elected Daniel J. Sanders in 1891 as the first African American to lead a four-year institution in the South. Between 1921 and 1922, Jane Berry Smith donated funds for a theological dormitory, a science hall, a teachers’ cottage, a memorial gate, and an endowment in memory of her late husband, Johnson C. Smith, along with five more buildings and a campus church; in recognition, university president H. L. McCrorey announced on February 3, 1922, that the school would be known as Johnson C. Smith University.