Miles College

History

The institution traces its origins to a petition in 1898 by the Alabama and North Alabama conferences of the Colored Methodist Episcopal (CME) Church, seeking a higher-education institution for Black Alabamians. The college was created by consolidating the CME Church's existing secondary schools at Booker City (now Docena) and Thomasville. In 1907, the school relocated to its present site in Fairfield under the leadership of its first president, James A. Bray, and the following year was renamed Miles Memorial College in honor of William H. Miles — a formerly enslaved man who became a CME bishop and one of the denomination's foundational figures.

In the late 1950s and 1960s, Miles College became one of the most active student organizing bases of the Birmingham civil rights movement. Miles students, working under President Lucius H. Pitts and in coordination with Fred Shuttlesworth's Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights, helped lead the 1962 selective buying campaign that pressured downtown Birmingham merchants to desegregate lunch counters and end discriminatory hiring. That campaign laid the groundwork for the 1963 Birmingham Children's Crusade and the Project C demonstrations led by Martin Luther King Jr. and the SCLC.

Today, Miles offers undergraduate degrees across six academic divisions and remains affiliated with the CME Church, with first- and second-year students attending weekly chapel services that sustain the institution's denominational character. Under President Bobbie Knight — who in 2019 became the first woman to lead the college and in 2020 was elected its fifteenth president — Miles expanded into graduate education in 2025, launching its first master's degree programs, in management and sports management. In September 2024 the Miles board voted unanimously to acquire the 192-acre campus of Birmingham-Southern College, the predominantly white liberal arts institution that had closed that May; the purchase agreement lapsed in late November 2024 after Birmingham-Southern's trustees declined a second extension of the closing date. The property was ultimately sold to the U.S. Coast Guard: the service selected the campus for a new training center in March 2026 and finalized the $126.5 million purchase in May 2026, foreclosing any renewed Miles bid. The episode is a telling inversion of the region's educational history: a historically Black college positioned to absorb the physical plant of a shuttered white institution six miles from its own campus.

Under Knight the college has paired that civic role with an explicit workforce-and-technology strategy. In May 2026 she was the sole HBCU president seated on the “Investing in the Resiliency of HBCUs” panel at the Milken Institute Global Conference, framing resilience as institutional strategy rather than rhetoric. Miles has committed $5 million to a UNCF endowment-matching program and built artificial-intelligence fluency into its offerings through a partnership with NVIDIA and a new 2150 Center for Commercialization and Growth — positioning a working-class pipeline institution to compete for the research and industry partnerships that have historically bypassed it.

Notable Alumni

A representative selection. Miles' alumni are disproportionately represented in the legal and political leadership of post-civil-rights Birmingham.

Significance

Miles College's significance is twofold. First, it has been a sustained institutional anchor for working-class Black Birmingham — a city whose Black population has been systematically excluded from the wealth-generating institutions of the metropolitan area, and for which Miles has offered one of the more accessible pathways into the professions, public service, and graduate study. Second, the college's role in the Birmingham civil rights movement is too often elided in narratives that center external figures arriving from Atlanta. The 1962 selective buying campaign, organized substantially by Miles students and faculty, is part of the local prehistory that made Birmingham 1963 possible. The campus should be read as one of the movement's working bases, not as a peripheral observer to it.

Source notes: This entry draws from Miles College institutional history; BlackPast.org's "Miles College (1905- )" entry; the Encyclopedia of Alabama; and biographical records on William H. Miles, Richard Arrington Jr., U. W. Clemon, and Autherine Lucy Foster. Note: published sources vary on the founding date (1898 chartering vs. 1905 reorganization). We use 1898 as the founding date with 1908 as the renaming date. Discrepancies noted in the corrections log.