More than one hundred years after the founding of Bluefield State College, the main campus remains poised high upon a hill above railroad tracks and overlooking the town's business district. For generations, the children of Black families living largely in southern West Virginia earned college degrees from this small teacher's college.

However in the past three decades, the local Black community together with middle-aged and elderly Black alumni have watched this formerly all-Black residential college transform into a predominantly White commuter school with community college offerings.

For Susie Guyton, a 1953 graduate of Bluefield State College, the national alumni association meetings used to be a time for rekindling ties with former classmates and other alumni. But last month when members of the Bluefield State College national alumni association returned to their alma mater, they found a campus that, for the first time in its 103-year history, has no Black faculty members.

"I'm very disappointed with the way the school is turning out," Guyton says.

Bluefield State offers what many believe to be the starkest example of a public historically Black institution losing its original identity to the demands of desegregation (see chart on pg. 18 for a listing of The Ten Whitest HBCUs). Despite their traditional mission, several public historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) around the country have come under court orders or state legislative mandates to become integrated institutions. Bluefield State, with an enrollment of more than 2,500 students, had just 177 Black students this past school year, making it the Whitest HBCU in the nation.

Changing the Course of History

Desegregation began at Bluefield State in the 1950s, when White Korean War veterans started attending the school. The college is one of two historically Black institutions in West Virginia. The other, West Virginia State College (WVSC), located in Kanawha County, still has a Black president and several Black faculty -- but it too has become predominantly White. Under state mandates, Bluefield State has grown from less than a thousand students in the 1960s, when it was predominantly Black, to more than 2,500 students now.