Inspired by a grand old building

Quick: What’s the highest spot of ground in Charlotte?

Answer: Biddle Hall at Johnson C. Smith University on Beatties Ford Road.
JCSU threw a small party Tuesday to celebrate its 140th anniversary and to show off its recently renovated Biddle Memorial Hall, which dates to 1883. It’s the red brick building with a tall clock tower visible from I-77. In demolition-happy Charlotte it’s one of only a few buildings remaining from the post-Civil War era.

Biddle Hall inspires in several ways. Atop the city’s highest hill, the views from President Dorothy Cowser Yancy’s fourth-floor office are stunning. She’s eye-to-eye – across the chasm of I-77 and a chunk of uptown – with the Bank of America Corporate Center.

It’s also inspiring to remember that more than a century ago, JCSU students had to help build Biddle Hall. As a historically black college, it has never benefited from the wealth lavished on a Harvard or Yale, or even UNC Chapel Hill. For the not-so-long-before enslaved black residents of the South, the chance to attend what was then Biddle Memorial Institute and get an education must have felt like a mirage come to life.

The luncheon’s guests, almost all women, included a number of current and former elected officials as well as civic activists and philanthropists. That, too, made many of us there feel a quiver of pride in what women have accomplished at JCSU and elsewhere, once we got a chance. Like many colleges, JCSU began as all-male. It didn’t admit women until 1932, and Dr. Yancy is the school’s first female president.

Finally, from the numbers of alumni in attendance and referred to with such affection, I glimpsed the closeness of the JCSU family. Several, such as Charlotte civic activist Jeanne Brayboy (who isn’t an alumna), have families with numerous generations of JCSU graduates.

Fun trivia: Among the school’s alumni are former U.S. Rep. Eva Clayton, who with Rep. Mel Watt in 1992 became North Carolina's first two black members of Congress since 1901; Vera and Darius Swann, whose lawsuit against Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools led to the U.S. Supreme Court ordering desegregation in 1971; John Rice, father of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Biddle Hall is one of Charlotte’s treasures – and not just for the black community but for the whole city. It’s worth a visit.

The hall’s renovation won a 2005 award from Preservation North Carolina. If you’d like to contribute to the school to help with upkeep of the newly restored hall, here’s a mailing address:

Send tax-deductible donations to Johnson C. Smith University, c/o Office of Development, 100 Beatties Ford Rd., Charlotte, NC 28216.