Virginia State University
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Virginia State University |
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| Established | 1882 |
| Type | Public land-grant university |
| President | Eddie N. Moore, Jr. |
| Faculty | 276 |
| Students | 4,872 |
| Undergraduates | 4,306 |
| Postgraduates | 566 |
| Location | Ettrick, Virginia, USA |
| Campus | Suburban, 236 acres (95.5 ha) |
| Colors | Blue and Orange |
| Nickname | Trojans |
| Athletics | NCAA Division II, CIAA |
| Website | www.vsu.edu |
Virginia State University is an historically black university located in Ettrick, Virginia (near Petersburg, in the Richmond area), and was founded on March 6, 1882. It was the United States's first fully state-supported four-year institution of higher learning for black Americans. Its first president was John Mercer Langston, who later became the first African-American elected to Congress from Virginia. The board of trustees was almost entirely African-American, except for one member. The faculty of the collegiate program and the normal school was African-American until the mid-1960s. The name used by the school's athletic teams is the "Mighty Trojans." The third season of the reality television series College Hill was filmed at Virginia State University in 2006. The university is a member school of the Thurgood Marshall Scholarship Fund.
[edit] History
Following the American Civil War, William Mahone (1826-1895) of Petersburg, Virginia was the driving force in the linkage of Norfolk and Petersburg Railroad, South Side Railroad and the Virginia & Tennessee Railroad in 1870 to form the Atlantic, Mississippi & Ohio Railroad (AM&O), a new line extending from Norfolk to Bristol. After several years of operating under receiverships, Mahone's role as a railroad builder ended in 1881 when the AM&O was sold at auction to form the Norfolk and Western Railway.
Mahone, a former Confederate general best known as the hero of the Battle of the Crater, later led Virginia's Readjuster Party and was a major proponent of public schools for the education of the former slaves and free blacks. He became a United States Senator from Virginia, and arranged for the proceeds of the AM&O sale to help found a school for teachers near Petersburg. In 1882, the Virginia Normal and Collegiate Institute at Petersburg was established. State delegate Alfred W. Harris, a black attorney, introduced the bill that established the institute.
In 1902, the legislature revised the school's charter and renamed it the Virginia Normal and Industrial Institute. In 1923, the college was renamed Virginia State College for Negroes, shortened to Virginia State College in 1946, and finally renamed Virginia State University in 1979. Meanwhile, the school's two-year branch in Norfolk, Virginia, founded in 1935, became Norfolk State College, now known as Norfolk State University.
Robert Russa Moton wrote in his autobiography, Finding a Way Out (Garden City, N.Y., and Toronto,Doubleday, Page & Company, 1921):
"The next morning I asked my father about the school for coloured people, which was being projected under the influence of General Mahone at Petersburg, now a State Normal School. He told me much about it. It was to open the following fall. The Hon. John M. Langston, he said, a coloured man who was as well educated as any white person that he knew of, was to be the president. He said I might go if I wished and that he would do what he could to help me. It being a state school, and he having certain strong friends in the Republican Party (General Mahone among them), Hon. B.S. Hooper, a member of Congress from the Fourth Congressional District of Virginia, would probably arrange for me to have a scholarship." [1], [2]
The school is also under a new era of construction on all its buildings and landmarks to accompany the rise in enrollment. President Eddie Moore, former Treasurer of the Commonwealth of Virginia, has outlined his plans for the school, known as the 2020 plan, including new facilities, a new law school and docotrate programs.
