North Carolina Central University

History

James Edward Shepard founded the National Religious Training School and Chautauqua for the Colored Race in Durham in 1910. Shepard was a pharmacist, minister, and educator who believed that Black North Carolinians needed not just vocational training but a full liberal arts education — the kind of education that produced not only workers but citizens, leaders, and thinkers. He raised the initial funding for the school through public appeals and personal contacts.

Durham in the early twentieth century was known as 'The Black Wall Street of the South' — a designation that referred to the remarkable concentration of Black-owned businesses along Parrish Street, including North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company (founded 1898 and still operating), Mechanics and Farmers Bank (founded 1908), and other enterprises that made Durham's Black community the most economically powerful Black community in the country. This economic context shaped NCCU's ambitions and its business school's tradition.

The state of North Carolina assumed control of Shepard's school in 1923, making it the first state-supported liberal arts college for Black students in the United States — a notable distinction in the landscape of HBCU development. As a state institution, NCCU became part of the University of North Carolina system in 1972.

NCCU's School of Law, founded in 1939, has been among the most important training grounds for Black lawyers in North Carolina and the Southeast. Its graduates have disproportionately represented Black North Carolinians in civil rights cases and have served on the North Carolina judiciary in significant numbers.

In the twenty-first century NCCU has entered a period of sustained growth. Dr. Karrie Dixon became the university’s thirteenth chancellor in 2024, the first woman to serve as permanent chancellor of two University of North Carolina System institutions. In fall 2025 the university enrolled 9,160 students, passing 9,000 for the first time in its 115-year history — a 6.8 percent increase driven by gains in online enrollment, graduate programs, and first- and second-year retention. NCCU has also launched an artificial-intelligence research institute developed in partnership with Google. In July 2026 the North Carolina state budget directed more than $110 million to the university, including roughly $98.6 million in recurring base funding, and Chancellor Dixon set a public goal of growing enrollment toward 10,000 students and securing R2 (high research activity) doctoral status. That momentum was realized in fall 2026, when the university enrolled a reported 10,124 students, carrying NCCU past 10,000 for the first time in its history — three years ahead of the 2029 goal Dixon had set and the fastest enrollment-growth rate in the University of North Carolina System. The increase was driven by double-digit gains among new first-year, transfer, online, and graduate students.

Durham's Black Wall Street and the University's Ambitions

NCCU was founded in and shaped by one of the most remarkable concentrations of Black economic power in American history. The businesses of Durham's Hayti neighborhood — anchored by North Carolina Mutual Life, the largest Black-owned business in the world for much of the early twentieth century — provided both a model of Black institutional ambition and a donor base that supported the university's early development. James Shepard's vision for NCCU was explicitly connected to the belief that Black economic power required Black intellectual infrastructure. The university and the business community grew together, each reinforcing the other's ambitions.

Notable Alumni

A representative selection. Alumni records are verified against institutional and published sources. Unverified entries are flagged explicitly — we do not fabricate records.

Source notes: Walter B. Weare, Black Business in the New South: A Social History of the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company (1973); NCCU institutional archives; Durham County records; James E. Shepard papers, Duke University Rubenstein Library.