Simon Green Atkins arrived in a city being built for tobacco and started building something else. In 1892, with a single room and backing from the John F. Slater Fund, he opened the Slater Industrial Academy — and didn't stop at the campus edge. He also developed Columbian Heights, the neighborhood surrounding it, treating institution and community as a single project. By 1925, the state had renamed the school Winston-Salem Teachers College and designated it the first Black institution in North Carolina empowered to grant degrees for elementary teacher education. Less than two miles away, a congregation organized in 1822 — after white Moravians stopped welcoming Black worshippers — had already been doing this work longer. They built a log church in 1823, a brick church in 1861, and endured. That brick building is the oldest surviving African American church structure in North Carolina. What Atkins built and what that congregation built share the same logic: you make the thing you are not given.
