TALLADEGA COLLEGE DESERVED BETTER THAN OUR SILENCE

Let me tell you something that still doesn’t sit right with me.

I grew up about thirty minutes from Talladega College. Thirty minutes. Close enough to drive there for lunch and be home before supper. And nobody taught me about it. Not really. Not in any way that made it feel weighty. Not in any way that made it feel like sacred ground.

That’s wild when you think about it.

In 1865, right after the Civil War, formerly enslaved men and women in Talladega didn’t wait for someone to hand them a future. They built one. With help from the American Missionary Association they started a school in a church because they were hungry to read, to write, to understand the world that had denied them for generations. They had been punished for literacy. Now they pursued it like oxygen.

And we barely talk about it.

The school was chartered in 1867. It became Alabama’s oldest private historically Black liberal arts college. Think about that. While the South was still smoldering from war, while resentment and racism were hardening into law, Black men and women were sitting in classrooms in Talladega, Alabama, daring to believe their minds mattered.

Some of the campus buildings tell their own story. Swayne Hall, one of the most recognizable structures, was originally built with enslaved labor before the war. Later it became part of a college educating the descendants of enslaved people. History flipped the script right there in brick and mortar.

And then there are the Amistad Murals, painted by Hale Woodruff in the 1930s. They tell the story of revolt, resistance, and freedom. Not as theory. Not as abstraction. As blood-and-bones history. That art lives in Alabama. Thirty minutes from where I grew up. And I was never walked through it. Never told to stand in front of it and feel the weight of it.

That says something.

Talladega College survived Reconstruction. It survived Jim Crow. It survived decades when Black education was underfunded, undermined, and openly opposed. It produced teachers, preachers, professionals, leaders. It kept showing up. Quietly. Steadily.

Meanwhile, a lot of us grew up nearby and never really learned the story.

How does that happen? How do you live that close to living history and never be taught to see it? How do you graduate high school in Alabama and not understand what was built right down the road by people who had every reason to give up but did not?

That is not an accident. That is omission.

Talladega College is not just another small school. It is a testimony. It is what happens when people who were denied everything decide they will not be denied education. It is what freedom looks like when it picks up a book.

And maybe it’s time we admit this: if you can grow up thirty minutes away and never be taught its story, something is wrong with how we tell our own history.

We should have known. We should have been taken there. We should have been told who built it and why it matters.

Thirty minutes away. And it took adulthood to understand what was sitting in my own backyard.

BDD