In 1867, seven Black men in Fayetteville, North Carolina pooled their own money to establish a school. They were formerly enslaved people and free Black men who understood that education was the foundation of everything emancipation had promised. The school they founded — first called the Howard School, later Fayetteville State University — is one of the oldest institutions of higher education for African Americans in the United States. It stands today as a direct institutional expression of what Black Americans built during Reconstruction, with their own resources, under conditions designed to prevent exactly that.
The founding came two years after the end of the Civil War, during the brief window of Reconstruction when Black political participation was legally protected and federally enforced. The Freedmen’s Bureau provided some support, but the initiative and the funding came from the Fayetteville Black community itself. The seven founders — Charles W. Chesnutt’s father among them — understood that a school was not merely a building. It was a declaration that Black people in Cumberland County intended to participate fully in American civic and intellectual life.
Charles W. Chesnutt, who grew up in Fayetteville and later taught at the Howard School before becoming its principal, went on to become one of the most important American writers of the late nineteenth century. His novels and stories — among the first by a Black author to be published by a major American press — drew directly on his experience in Fayetteville and the Cape Fear region. The school that his community built produced the man who would challenge white America’s literary imagination at its highest levels.
Fayetteville State University survived Reconstruction’s end, the rise of Jim Crow, the Wilmington Massacre ninety miles away, and a century of systematic underfunding. It became a four-year institution in 1939, joined the University of North Carolina system in 1972, and today enrolls more than 6,000 students. It remains a Historically Black College and University — one of 107 HBCUs in the United States, each of them a monument to what Black Americans built when the country refused to include them.
The seven men who pooled their money in 1867 could not have known that what they were building would still be standing 158 years later. They knew only that their children deserved to learn. That decision — made in Fayetteville, North Carolina, two years after emancipation — is one of the most consequential acts of institution-building in the history of the American South.