Winston-Salem State University (WSSU)

The city that built itself on tobacco needed something else to sustain it — and in 1892, Simon Green Atkins provided the answer. He founded what would become Winston-Salem State University as the Slater Industrial Academy, supported by the John F. Slater Fund, beginning with a single room and a handful of students. Atkins didn't stop at the campus edge: he also developed the surrounding Columbian Heights neighborhood, understanding that an institution and its community are the same project.

The school's trajectory followed the arc of Black education in the South — incremental, hard-won, consequential. By 1925, the North Carolina General Assembly had renamed it Winston-Salem Teachers College, and the State Board of Education designated it the first Black institution empowered to grant degrees for elementary teacher education. That distinction mattered. It meant the state had formally acknowledged what Atkins had built.

Today the university enrolls approximately 5,200 students across more than 40 academic majors on a campus of more than 40 buildings covering 117 acres. The Social Mobility Index ranked it seventh among all colleges in the United States — a measure of how many students it moves up the economic ladder, which is precisely what Atkins intended when he opened that first room. In 2025, MacKenzie Scott donated $50 million to the university, the largest single gift in its history.

Come for Diggs Gallery, recognized as one of the top African American galleries in its region, and home to the Biggers murals. Come because this campus is not a monument to aspiration — it is evidence of what happens when aspiration is organized, funded, and refused to fail.