Concordia College Alabama — The Only Black Lutheran College in America, Closed in Selma

Summary

Concordia College Alabama, a small historically Black college in Selma, Alabama, founded in 1922 and the only historically Black college of the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod, announced in February 2018 that it would close at the end of that spring semester. On April 28, 2018, it graduated a final class of 147 students and ceased to exist after ninety-six years. It was the only one of the ten campuses of the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod's Concordia University System founded to serve Black students, and its closing erased a singular institution: the place where the denomination's commitment to Black education in the Deep South had taken physical form for nearly a century.

The college began as the dream of one woman. Rosa J. Young, an African American educator remembered as "the mother of Black Lutheranism," opened a school for Black children in rural Alabama, sought help from Booker T. Washington, and was directed by him to the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod when Tuskegee could not assist. The Synod sent a missionary, and in November 1922 the institution that became Concordia opened in Selma with fewer than ten students. Over the following decades it grew from a teacher-and-minister training school into a junior college and, finally, a four-year, accredited, baccalaureate-granting college — a steady, unglamorous engine of Black advancement in a city that would become a crucible of the civil-rights movement.

It was never large or rich. At its height in the 1960s it enrolled roughly 650 students; by the fall of 2017 it counted about 445, more than 90 percent of them Black and more than 90 percent eligible for federal Pell Grants — which is to say, drawn almost entirely from low-income families for whom Concordia was an affordable door into a degree. The college had been propped up for years by the Synod, which by its own account had directed more than 44 percent of its entire ten-campus subsidy to Concordia Alabama since 2006. When the denomination concluded that the figures would not come right and that its limited resources had to be spread across "so many worthy mission-and-ministry opportunities," the subsidy that had kept the lights on in Selma ended. The board filed a teach-out plan with its accreditor and closed. What was lost was not a struggling diploma mill but a 96-year-old HBCU in Selma, a piece of Black Lutheran history, and the largest concrete expression of a denomination's promise to a community.

Timeline

Rosa Young's School

Concordia College Alabama did not begin in a boardroom or a denominational strategy memo. It began with Rosa J. Young, a Black schoolteacher in the rural Black Belt of Alabama who, in the years around 1916, opened a school for Black children and watched it founder for lack of money. She wrote to Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee for help; Washington, unable to fund another school, pointed her toward the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod, which had begun mission work among Black Southerners. The Synod sent a Norwegian American missionary, the Rev. Nils J. Bakke, who took up the work, and out of that improbable partnership — a Black educator's persistence and a German Lutheran denomination's mission — grew the institution that opened in Selma in November 1922 with fewer than ten students.

The school's early decades were a long apprenticeship. It carried a procession of names — Alabama Lutheran Academy, Lutheran Academy and Junior College — and more than once it slid backward, reverting to high-school work when the college level proved unsustainable. But the through-line never changed: it existed to train Black teachers and church workers in a region where, for most of the twentieth century, the formal education of Black Southerners was actively obstructed. Young's name became synonymous with the entire enterprise of Black Lutheranism in Alabama, and Concordia was its mother church in academic form. By the time the civil-rights movement converged on Selma in the 1960s, the college had become a four-year-bound institution and a fixture of the city's Black life, enrolling around 650 students at its high-water mark. It was the only historically Black college the Synod operated, anywhere — a distinction it would hold until its last day.

A Mission Subsidy Runs Out

Concordia's strength and its weakness were the same fact: it was a mission, not a market. It served the students other institutions priced out — by the end, a student body more than 90 percent Black and more than 90 percent Pell-eligible — and it could do so only because the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod paid the difference between what those students could afford and what the college cost to run. For decades the arrangement held. The college earned full four-year accreditation from the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools in 1994 under a long-serving president, Julius Jenkins, who dragged it from junior-college status to baccalaureate work and built its first real endowment. On paper it had become a proper college.

But the economics of a tuition-discounted mission college are brutal, and they worsened through the 2010s. Concordia had little endowment to cushion a downturn and almost no pricing power; nearly every student needed aid, which meant the institution discounted its way to the enrollment it reported and then had to find the cash to cover the gap somewhere else. That somewhere was the Synod. By the denomination's own accounting, Concordia Alabama had absorbed more than 44 percent of the entire subsidy distributed across the Concordia University System's ten campuses since July 2006 — an extraordinary concentration of support on a single small school. In 2015 the college cut its half-million-dollar football program. It searched for an outside investor to retire its debt and mortgage. Nothing closed the gap. When the Synod concluded that Concordia "was not able to achieve acceptable and sustainable financial performance," and that its limited resources had to be weighed against "so many worthy mission-and-ministry opportunities both at home and abroad," the lifeline that had defined the college from its founding was withdrawn.

The Five Factors

Aftermath

Concordia's students dispersed at the end of the spring 2018 term, the 147 graduates with their degrees and the rest carrying credits to other institutions under the teach-out arrangement, with the inevitable losses of momentum and money that transferring imposes. The college's small workforce — fewer than 100 employees by the end — lost their jobs in a city that could not easily absorb them. The 57-acre campus, expanded only a few years earlier, was sold in January 2019 to a private buyer who spoke of a retreat center and a contemporary-music school; whatever became of those plans, the property would no longer function as a college.

The larger loss was harder to inventory. Concordia had been the only historically Black college in the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod, the institutional heart of the Black Lutheran tradition that Rosa Young and Nils Bakke had planted in the Alabama Black Belt in 1922. Its closing left that tradition without its college and left Selma — a city already losing ground — with one fewer anchor of Black higher education. For the denomination, the episode became a quiet case study in the limits of subsidy: a sponsor can keep a mission college alive for decades, but it cannot make the underlying economics work, and the day it stops trying is the day the mission ends. For the alumni, scattered across nearly a century of graduating classes, what remained was a memory and a name on a closed campus in a town that knows, better than most, what it costs to lose ground that was hard won.

Lessons

References

• Concordia Alabama, a historically black college, announces that it will shut down operations Inside Higher Ed
• Concordia College in Selma to close after 95 years WSFA
• Concordia College Alabama to close at end of spring semester The Selma Times-Journal
• Concordia College Alabama Encyclopedia of Alabama
• Concordia College Alabama Wikipedia