Fayetteville State University

History

In 1867, seven Black men — David A. Bryant, Nelson Carter, Andrew J. Chesnutt, George Grainger, Matthew Leary, Thomas Lomax, and Robert Simmons — pooled $136 to buy two lots in Fayetteville, North Carolina, on which they established a school for the education of Black children. They named it the Howard School in honor of General Oliver Otis Howard, head of the Freedmen's Bureau. (The school's name is unrelated to the Washington, D.C. institution founded the same year.)

In 1877, the State of North Carolina assumed responsibility for the school, designating it the State Colored Normal School — the first state-sponsored institution in the South dedicated to training African American teachers. This act both formalized the school's mission and embedded it within North Carolina's emerging system of public Black higher education.

The institution evolved across the twentieth century: it became Fayetteville State Teachers College in 1939, expanded its degree offerings, and was renamed Fayetteville State University in 1969. FSU joined the consolidated University of North Carolina System in 1972.

Today, FSU offers more than 60 baccalaureate, master's, and doctoral programs across business, education, social work, health, and the sciences, and serves a heavily military-connected student population owing to its proximity to Fort Bragg (renamed Fort Liberty from 2023 to 2025 before the original name was restored) — one of the largest U.S. military installations in the world. In February 2025, FSU became the first university to sign an educational partnership agreement with the XVIII Airborne Corps, creating a framework for training and applied-research support to the 80,000-person unit. Under Chancellor Darrell T. Allison, the university's research portfolio has grown from roughly $15 million in 2021 to more than $46 million by early 2026, and enrollment — about 7,600 at the start of the 2025–26 academic year — reached a record of more than 7,700 students by fall 2026, its fifth consecutive year of growth, with a first-year retention rate of 80.7 percent (the first time the university has surpassed 80 percent) and an incoming class averaging a 3.45 GPA, the highest in university history.

Notable Alumni

A representative selection.

Significance

FSU's founding is one of the cleanest examples in HBCU history of an institution built entirely by Black initiative and capital before being absorbed by a state government. The seven founders did not wait for state appropriation, philanthropic mission boards, or federal Reconstruction policy; they pooled their own money, bought the land, and put up a building.

The 1877 designation as the first state-sponsored Black teacher-training school in the South marks a quieter but equally important moment — the formal entry of an HBCU into the public funding stream that today defines the UNC System's accountability to its HBCU constituents. The size of FSU's military-connected student body further distinguishes it: the university is one of the largest HBCU producers of commissioned and non-commissioned officers serving in the U.S. military, a population that has shaped its academic priorities and online program design.

Source notes: Founding facts drawn from FSU institutional history and contemporaneous Reconstruction-era records. Charles W. Chesnutt's familial connection to FSU's founders sourced from biographical scholarship; he is described as "associated" rather than an alumnus because the Howard School at the time of his youth was not a college. Enrollment figures sourced from FSU communications and IPEDS.