A Majority-White HBCU Tries to Reconcile With Its Racist Past, and Stumbles

A Majority-White HBCU Tries to Reconcile With Its Racist Past, and Stumbles

By Eric Kelderman
JULY 25, 2023

 A week before Thanksgiving, in 1968, a bomb blew a hole in the side of the new gymnasium at Bluefield State College. The explosion was relatively minor. But the college’s response — eliminating housing on campus — left deep emotional wounds for the institution’s Black alumni and has made it difficult for the institution to rebuild trust with that community or rekindle a campus culture that reflects Bluefield State’s legacy as a historically Black college. Amid plummeting enrollment, Bluefield State, now a university, hired its current president in 2019 with a promise to build housing on campus, attract new students, and put the institution on a path to embrace its identity as an HBCU. Four years later, alumni and some students say the West Virginia university has fallen short of its goals The explosion came after months of civil unrest at the institution as Black students, who had once been the majority on campus, protested the actions and policies of Bluefield State’s first white president, Wendell Hardaway, who was widely accused of trying to get rid of Black students and faculty after he arrived in 1966. White students had begun attending the institution in the 1920s, according to documentation from Bluefield State. By the time of the explosion, Black students accounted for less than a third of the 1,400 undergraduates.

No one was killed, or injured, by the blast, which caused an estimated $80,000 damage to the building, according to news accounts at the time. Several young men were arrested and charged with conspiracy; no one was ever charged with actually placing the bomb. But the president closed the dormitories, making it difficult for Black students, in particular, to find housing near the campus, alumni said, contributing to the steady decline in minority enrollment at an institution founded, in 1895, for the children of former slaves who came to work in the coal mines. After the explosion, “we had some hardships,” said Ervin Griffin, who was then a sophomore at Bluefield State. Griffin was able to rent a room from a Black woman in Closing the dormitories also made it difficult to sustain the rich campus experience of a historically Black college, said Griffin, now president emeritus of Halifax Community College, in Weldon, N.C. “There was some semblance of campus life,” he said, “but nothing like it was before.” Vernon Oakes, an alumnus who was part of the student body in 1968, believes that closing the dorms was part of Hardaway’s plan to get rid of Black students and culture at Bluefield State. Conversations with other alumni and historical documents corroborate this view.

After the explosion, Oakes said, he had difficulty engaging in his studies, and his grades dropped even for his favorite courses in chemistry. To finish his degree, Oakes said he took a few courses at other colleges while working. He graduated in 1970 and went on to earn a master’s degree in mathematics from Pennsylvania State University and an M.B.A. from Stanford University. By the time Robin C. Capehart was named interim president in January 2019, Black students comprised just 7 percent of the enrollment. But the board and interim president acknowledged that campus life had suffered without housing on campus.

At commencement that year, the board voted to remove Hardaway’s name from the library and instead put up the name of William B. Robertson, a Black alumnus who served in various policy roles with five U.S. presidents. In his Substack newsletter, Capehart wrote that Hardaway’s “bigoted action in shutting down residence life on campus served as a deep, hurtful, and open wound to the dedicated alumni who had endured such an injustice.” The Board of Governors appointed Capehart to a permanent position in July that year with the promise that he could bring housing back to Bluefield State.

“During Robin Capehart’s 7.5 months as interim president, he has secured funding and commitments of support to permit the official start of construction for the first on-campus housing in more than 50 years,” Rev. Garry Moore, who was chair of the Board of Governors then, said in a July 2019 statement announcing Capehart’s appointment as president. The dormitory project, called Heritage Village, was meant to attract more students to the campus. But it was also a symbol of the university’s renewed spirit, a way to repair the racism and trauma of the 1968 bombing. “It’s been 52 years since we’ve had housing on campus,” Capehart said at the groundbreaking in July 2020. “We have a lot of alumni in the area who were here in 1968,” he told the alumni magazine. “They were hurt and with good reason.” Three years later, there is only a retaining wall, and a pile of bare dirt and construction debris where Heritage Village was supposed to be. Construction on the site halted in May 2022. Capehart and other administrators have offered a range of explanations, but few details, for why the project was left unfinished, including unforeseen problems with the site, increased costs, an overall lack of money, and the acquisition of a former hospital that has been renovated for student housing. While the university has provided student housing at the renovated hospital, nearly a mile from the campus, some students say the accommodations are subpar. And many alumni, faculty, and community members are frustrated that the unfinished project has left an eyesore on the campus for so many years. “Driving on campus and seeing that, it’s kind of interesting. Let me put it that way,” Griffin said.

A plan to rebuild dormitories at Bluefield State had begun to take shape under the previous president, Marsha Krotseng. In 2014, Krotseng led the development of a 10-year campus master plan that envisioned three new residence halls to hold 576 students, along with a new underground-parking garage, a new fitness center, and improved walkways around the campus. The plan, costing nearly $34-million dollars, also set a goal of enrolling more than 2,400 students by 2024. The university considered financing the new construction through a public-private partnership, a popular model for many institutions that usually rely on a private developer to front the building costs and lease the building back to the college. A local foundation also pledged $1.5 million toward the construction, contingent on the university raising another $500,000. Krotseng, however, resigned in late 2018, under pressure from city officials and others who criticized her leadership as well as the university’s declining enrollment. Through a spokesperson, she declined to comment for this story. Dane Rideout, Bluefield’s city manager during Krotseng’s tenure, said the dorms proposed in the master plan were “ludicrous” — like the “Taj Mahal.” City officials had proposed that the university purchase and convert a nearby apartment complex that was being used to provide subsidized housing for low-income residents.

“Look, we’re a small school. We couldn’t do two
housing projects, and this one gave us the most
bang for our buck.”

When Capehart became president, the university announced a scaled-down version of the dormitories imagined in the campus plan. The newly named Heritage Village would have provided housing for about 120 students in four separate two-story buildings, each with 15 rooms with their own bathrooms and a laundry room on each floor.

Initially, the proposal generated a good deal of excitement and even some support from state officials. Gov. Jim Justice, a Republican, attended the groundbreaking and announced $500,000 of state money that he said would “kickstart” donations from others to complete the project. “This facility will have people in it very, very, very soon and here we go at Bluefield State. And absolutely you’ve waited too long, 50 years is ridiculous,” Justice is quoted in a news release of the event. At the groundbreaking, Capehart said the dormitory project was a key to Bluefield State’s growth and to attracting Black students back to campus. “We know the impact it has on enrollment,” Capehart said in a news article, “especially with our African American enrollment.” actual work on Heritage Village didn’t begin until July 2020. Over the next two years, Capehart and other campus officials provided several assurances to the board, public, and media that the dormitories would be built. “We are projecting beds will be available for students for the January term, but it is likely it will be before that,” Brent D. Benjamin, the university’s general counsel, told the Princeton Times in April 2021. “I believe we will have Heritage Village ready to go sometime this fall.” The following year workers left the site with little to show for their work except a single retaining wall.

During an interview, Capehart listed several issues that contributed to the delay, including “because of the ground it was on,” construction and supply-chain problems because of Covid-19, and a lack of money. In the April 2021 news article, Benjamin blamed problems dealing with old underground utility lines as well as disruptions from the pandemic and the weather. Another problem went unmentioned: The university had not secured or even asked for permission for the project from the state’s Higher Education Policy Commission, according to the commission’s spokesperson. All but two public universities in the state must receive authorization from the commission for capital projects that cost more than $3 million. A bill, proposed during the 2022 legislative session, to exempt Bluefield State from that requirement failed just a month before the construction on Heritage Village halted. In a written statement, university officials said the failure of the legislation had nothing to do with halting the construction. The statement did not address a reporter’s question on why the university didn’t seek approval from the policy commission. It’s not clear whether the university actually had a plan to pay for Heritage Village. Despite the statement from the board chair that Capehart had “secured the money and commitments” to build the dormitory, the university couldn’t actually afford the project, which had an estimated price tag of more than $12 million, Capehart said in an interview. In a written response, the university said only that “funding and support commitments to enable a decision to restore on-campus housing to Bluefield State came from a variety of sources, including the Bluefield State College Foundation.”

What the university has been able to afford is remodeling empty space in a hospital nearly a mile from campus. Most medical operations were moved to a different location during the pandemic. The land and facility were donated to the university, according to the state’s annual audit, and together are valued at more than $22 million. Instead of housing a few dozen students in Heritage Village, the university now has nearly 200 dormitory rooms at the converted hospital. The university has spent about $3.5 million on the renovation, according to financial statements. “Look, we’re a small school,” Capehart said. “We couldn’t do two housing projects, and this one gave us the most bang for our buck.” Capehart and other administrators have hailed the new off-campus housing as a historic development that will revitalize the university. The dorms have helped to support an increased number of Black students who enrolled at Bluefield State after the university added football and numerous other sports. Black students now make up about 14 percent of the university’s undergraduates. But there have been problems with the renovated hospital as well, including student complaints about the quality of the facilities, a rise in reported crimes, difficulties getting students to and from the dorms, and the costs of running the nonprofit company created to manage the housing. “Speaking for myself, I didn’t like it,” said Malik Tidwell, a junior from Chicago who transferred to Bluefield State to play basketball last season. The cafeteria is good, Tidwell said, but the rooms are “really small, and the beds were uncomfortable.” Tidwell has now transferred to Georgia Southern University because he wanted an opportunity to compete at a higher division in the National Collegiate Athletic Association. Samuel DeSouza, another member of the basketball team, doesn’t live at the former medical center, he said, but has had trouble finding other housing in such a small city. A lot of athletes, he said, apply to live at an apartment complex in Bluefield that accepts Section 8 vouchers, which subsidize rent for low-income residents. The university provides bus service to and from the dorms, but it can still be difficult for students without cars to get to classes or activities. The shortest walking distance from the housing is four-fifths of a mile along a two-lane road without sidewalks and over a bridge to cross railroad tracks.

In addition, the management company created to oversee the renovations and dormitory operations has been losing money. University leaders are now trying to find a more cost-efficient way to manage the housing. Capehart helped create the Collegiate Housing Corporation of Bluefield, Inc. just four
months after he became interim president, and chose James Shaffer, a longtime business associate, to run it. Capehart said he chose Shaffer to run the housing operation because of his experience in that field, but he could not elaborate on what that experience was. “You know what?” he said. “I think it was more of his family and everything.” Reached by telephone, Shaffer said all questions should be directed to university
officials.

Capehart said the university is now looking for a different way to manage campus housing because Collegiate Housing “got into cash-flow problems, and we want to “We’ve got avenues right now of resolving those,” Capehart said, “and honestly, you’re getting into an area that I really don’t know that much about.” Charlie Cole, chair of the university’s Board of Governors, said the board was aware of the corporation’s financial problems and was looking at options to replace the organization. At the end of April, Capehart said the university still intended to finish Heritage Village, but more recently university officials have backtracked. At a community meeting in May 2023, Bluefield residents complained about the eyesore on campus, according to a news account, and university officials said plans were underway to beautify the space. At the May meeting of the Board of Governors, university officials said the institution would no longer be involved with the housing corporation, which will “have to file for a dissolution,” according to minutes of the meeting.

In June, Benjamin, the university’s general counsel, told city officials that the area on campus where dorms had been planned would be turned into a green space with some beautification, according to Bluefield Daily Telegraph. Any plans for housing on the site are dependent on future needs for housing and the relative costs of construction, he told the newspaper. Oakes, the Bluefield State alumnus, who had been involved in an earlier effort to develop a cooperative housing unit at a nearby hotel, said the hospital wasn’t a bad solution for student housing. But he has no hope that Capehart or the Board of Governors can complete the Heritage Village dorms or restore Bluefield State’s mission as an HBCU.

Griffin said, as a former college president, he understands how the renovated hospital was appealing to administrators. But for many alumni, he said, the possibility of a revived campus with a dormitory is still a worthy dream for the university. “For me and many of my generation,” Griffin said, “that would be a very meaningful thing to have it there.”

Dan Bauman contributed to this article