Kittrell College

History

Kittrell College originated in the AME Church's postbellum educational expansion in the upper South. Chartered on February 7, 1886, it began as a normal school to train Black teachers and tradespeople in a region with no equivalent public provision. The school was rechartered in 1887 as Kittrell Institute, and again in 1899 with authority to offer post-secondary instruction. The name Kittrell College followed in 1901.

For roughly five decades the institution served as a primary route into Black professional and clerical life in central North Carolina and southern Virginia. Its operation was funded by AME assessments, alumni gifts, and tuition; the resulting fragility produced the 1934-37 closure during the Depression and the 1948 second closure during the disinvestment that followed World War II. The 1953 reopening reflected a strategic pivot to combined high-school and junior-college operations — a structure intended to broaden tuition base and align with the demand pattern of Black families in a state whose Jim Crow secondary system remained underfunded.

Kittrell's most-cited public act came in 1959-60. When Prince Edward County, Virginia, closed its public schools rather than integrate them — an episode that became the standard reference for "Massive Resistance" — high-school seniors in Farmville and the surrounding Black community lost their final year of secondary education. Kittrell College extended full scholarships to those seniors, allowing them to complete their education and pursue post-secondary work. The act drew national notice and embedded Kittrell in the documented record of HBCU institutional response to white-state defiance of Brown.

The post-1965 period saw the high-school division wind down (the last secondary class graduated in 1965), leaving Kittrell as a small, financially constrained two-year college. Without a sustainable revenue model, accreditation eroded, and the college closed in 1975.

Notable Alumni

A representative selection. Kittrell's alumni base spans architecture, education, ministry, and athletics across the upper South.

Significance

Kittrell College's institutional value sits at the intersection of two distinct stories in HBCU history. The first is the long-run challenge of denominational HBCU sustainability: small AME-funded schools serving rural and small-town Black communities operated on persistently thin margins, and many — including Kittrell — moved through cycles of closure, reorganization, and partial repurposing before final dissolution. Kittrell's two reopenings (1937 and 1953) demonstrate institutional adaptability that bought the school four additional decades but could not overcome the structural deficit.

The second story is moral. Kittrell's 1959-60 decision to enroll Farmville's locked-out high-school seniors made it one of the few institutions to provide a concrete educational response to Prince Edward County's "Massive Resistance" closures. The Moton Museum in Farmville and the North Carolina Highway Historical Marker program both preserve Kittrell's role in that episode. The college's name persists in the historical literature on the civil rights movement not because of its size or endowment but because, at a moment when the law had failed Black students in another state, a small AME junior college took them in.