Postmark Greensboro: UNCG, Then and Now

Anyone who has driven through the university campus along what is now Spring Garden Street will recognize the view down College Avenue. In 1912, a student sent a postcard from this same vantage point, showcasing the only original structure on UNC-Greensboro’s campus, the Julius I. Foust Building.

At that time, the State Normal and Industrial College was just 21 years old. Established in 1891, it was North Carolina’s first state-supported college for women—and far from a certain success.

UNC-Chapel Hill had been the nation’s first state public university in 1789. But at the outset, it was exclusively for white men in a financial and social position to attend. It would be more than a century before a woman earned a degree at Carolina—and women were then required to get an undergraduate degree at a private women’s college first.

When Sallie Walker Stockard became the first woman to graduate from UNC in 1898, Greensboro was also at the heart of her story. She did her undergraduate work at Guilford College, a private Quaker school that was co-educational from its founding in 1837. During Stockard’s time at UNC, she faced constant reminders that she was considered inferior, including exclusion from on-campus housing, graduation ceremonies, and even class pictures.

By the late 1800s, some male graduates of Carolina had joined the burgeoning school reform movement—and it was apparent reform should begin at home. At that time, nearly a third of all North Carolina citizens were illiterate. School attendance rates were dramatically behind the U.S. as a whole and state spending on education was some of the lowest in the nation.

Charles Duncan McIver knew the value of education. The son of a poor farmer, he made his way to Chapel Hill on a county scholarship and assumed debt he would struggle to pay back on teacher’s wages upon graduation. Having been ill-prepared when he arrived at Chapel Hill himself, he knew North Carolina needed more and better public schools—which meant more and better teachers. After a stint teaching at a private girls’ school, he became convinced educating the state’s women was the key.

“When a man is educated it is simply one more taken from the lists of ignorance,” he wrote. “But in the education of a woman the whole family is taught, for she will pass on what she has learned to her children. The education of one woman is far more important for the world’s advancement than that of one man.”

McIver campaigned for and got a bill in the legislature to establish a state college for women. But religious groups, private schools for women, and those against the education of women in general made sure the bill was defeated. McIver would have to start smaller, with a modest appropriation to conduct “teachers’ institutes” around the state.

McIver’s friend, the journalist Walter H. Page, called what followed “one of the most remarkable campaigns in American history,” a statewide push for popular public education Page said, “set forces going which in twenty years have changed North Carolina from a backward illiterate commonwealth to one of the most energetic and eager educational communities in the country.”

In 1891, the state legislature successfully passed bills establishing not one but two new schools in Greensboro dedicated to opening higher education beyond just white men—the State Normal and Industrial School, of which McIver became the first president, and the A&M College for the Colored Race, which would become N.C. A&T University.

McIver led the school for fifteen years, until his death in 1906. In that time, more than 3,000 women attended. Those women taught more than 200,000 children in the public schools.

The school went co-educational in 1963, becoming UNC-Greensboro. But it has maintained the progressive ethos of its early mission of providing access to higher education beyond moneyed white men. Today UNCG is one of the most racially and ethnically diverse campuses in the UNC system, with 53 percent of its students being people of color. It is number one in the system for total percentage of Hispanic/Latinx students. Half of all UNCG students self-identify as first-generation college students and nearly half meet the financial need to get federal Pell grants.

The university is consistently ranked as one of the top campuses in the state for social mobility by U.S. News & World Report’s Best Colleges—a measure of its enrolling and graduating students from disadvantaged backgrounds.

“When you look at it, from the beginning social mobility has been our mission,” said current UNCG Chancellor Frank Gilliam in an interview earlier this year. “Not just for our students but for the whole community, the whole state, wherever our graduates go and improve their communities.”