Saint Paul's College

History

James Solomon Russell was born enslaved in Mecklenburg County, Virginia in 1857. After emancipation he was educated at Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute and the Bishop Payne Divinity School, was ordained to the Episcopal diaconate in 1882, and was sent by Bishop Francis M. Whittle of the Diocese of Virginia to organize a mission and school for freed people in Brunswick County. On September 24, 1888, Russell opened the Saint Paul Normal and Industrial School in Lawrenceville with fewer than a dozen students and a single classroom. The institution's name reflected its dual mission — to train Black teachers (the “Normal” function) and to prepare students for agricultural and skilled industrial work in a rural Southern economy.

Russell ran the school for forty-one years, retiring formally in December 1929. By that time Saint Paul's had grown to roughly 800 students, more than fifty staff members, and thirty-six buildings on a continuously expanding rural campus. Russell was elected suffragan bishop by both the Diocese of North Carolina and the Diocese of Arkansas during his tenure — the first Black American so elected in the Episcopal Church — but declined both elections to remain at Saint Paul's. He received an honorary Doctor of Divinity from the Protestant Episcopal Theological Seminary in Virginia in 1917, the Harmon Foundation gold medal in 1928 for distinguished achievement in religion and education, and an honorary Doctor of Law from Monrovia College in Liberia in 1922.

After Russell's death in 1935, the institution evolved beyond its normal-and-industrial origins into a four-year liberal arts college, renamed Saint Paul's College and authorized to confer bachelor's degrees. By the late twentieth century the institution had developed signature programs in education, business administration, and the social sciences. In 1987 Saint Paul's launched the Single Parent Support System (SPSS), a residential program that allowed single parents to live with their young children on campus while pursuing a degree — for years the only program of its kind in American higher education.

Through the 1990s and 2000s, Saint Paul's was increasingly squeezed by the financial pressures common to small, rural, tuition-dependent private HBCUs: declining enrollment, narrowing operating margins, deferred maintenance on an aging physical plant, and an inability to invest in the faculty credentialing required by regional accreditation standards. By 2011 the institution was on SACSCOC probation. Accreditation was withdrawn in June 2012, federal Title IV eligibility ended with it, and the college could not survive the loss of student aid revenue.

Notable Alumni and Faculty

• James Solomon Russell — founder, longtime principal, and the formerly enslaved Episcopal priest whose work made Saint Paul's possible.
• L. Douglas Wilder — while best known as a Howard Law graduate and Virginia governor, Wilder spoke frequently at Saint Paul's and was among the institution's most prominent public defenders during its accreditation struggle.
• Joseph N. Stokes — Episcopal priest, educator, and longtime Saint Paul's administrator who succeeded Russell's institutional model into the mid-twentieth century.
• Hundreds of Virginia public school teachers — the dominant trajectory of Saint Paul's graduates was into the segregated and then desegregated public school systems of Southside Virginia and northeastern North Carolina, where the college served for generations as the primary pipeline of Black classroom teachers.

Significance

Saint Paul's College was the sixth HBCU in Virginia and one of only two Episcopal-affiliated HBCUs in the United States — the other being Saint Augustine's University in Raleigh, with which Saint Paul's nearly merged in its final year. Its closure in 2013 left the Episcopal Church with a single federally designated HBCU and removed the only four-year HBCU from a rural region of Southside Virginia that had relied on the institution for educational access for five generations.

The institutional contribution of James Solomon Russell extends well beyond the campus he built. A man born enslaved who founded, sustained, and directed a four-year college for more than four decades; who twice declined election as a Black suffragan bishop in the segregated Episcopal Church to remain a working educator; and whose model of normal-and-industrial education for the rural Black South paralleled and competed with the better-known programs at Hampton and Tuskegee, represents a distinct nineteenth-century HBCU founding tradition — clerical, Episcopal, and rooted in the agricultural Black Belt rather than the industrial New South.

The Single Parent Support System Saint Paul's pioneered in 1987 anticipated by a generation the “two-generation” education models that contemporary higher-education researchers now identify as essential to closing intergenerational educational gaps. That a small, rural HBCU on the brink of financial crisis built such a program decades before mainstream institutions adopted similar models is one of the more under-recognized policy contributions of the closed-HBCU canon.