Virginia State University

Overview

Virginia State University is a public historically Black land-grant university in Ettrick and Colonial Heights, Virginia, founded March 6, 1882 — the first fully state-supported four-year institution of higher learning for Black Americans in the United States. The legislature chartered the Virginia Normal and Collegiate Institute that day, in a bill sponsored by Delegate Alfred W. Harris, a Black attorney; a hostile lawsuit delayed its opening for nineteen months, until October 1, 1883. In 1902 the legislature curtailed the collegiate program and renamed the school the Virginia Normal and Industrial Institute; in 1920 the state’s land-grant program for Black students was transferred there from Hampton Institute, where it had been housed since 1872. The collegiate program was restored in 1923, and the school was renamed Virginia State College for Negroes in 1930; its Norfolk branch, added in 1944, became independent as Norfolk State College in 1969.

The First Academic Year

In its first academic year, 1883-84, Virginia State enrolled 126 students taught by seven Black faculty members, housed in one building on 33 acres with a 200-book library and a $20,000 budget. Its first president, John Mercer Langston, was one of the best-known Black men of his era — until 1992 he remained the only Black man ever elected to Congress from Virginia, elected in 1888 — and was the great-uncle of poet Langston Hughes.