Bluefield, West Virginia · Founded 1895 · Big Blue (mascot character: Sir Blue)
“The HBCU that lost its dorms, its football, and most of its Black students — and is now clawing everything back: football's back, the dorms are back, the band's back, and the Big Blue just played for a CIAA basketball title.”
WOAY TV's report from the first practice of the program's rebirth — football back on campus for the first time in 41 years, August 2021.
HBCU Gameday's 2025 season feature — former NFL safety Davon Morgan, hired that March, rebuilding the program around the motto 'We Are One.'
The Mercer County rivalry renewed: full-game stream of the September 5, 2026 clash at Callaghan Stadium — Concord 26–22, breaking Bluefield State's two-game win streak.
Concord head coach Cody Edwards breaks down the 26–22 rivalry win — the opponent's view of the Mercer County series.
Game highlights from the September 12, 2026 CIAA opener against Livingstone — the series that began the CIAA return with the 41–7 win in 2023.
Highlights from the program's biggest basketball stage: the 2026 CIAA men's championship game at CFG Bank Arena in Baltimore — Fayetteville State 71–68, but the Big Blue led at halftime and battled to the final horn.
Short-form explainer on the most debated chapter in HBCU history: the 1968 dorm closures and how Bluefield State went from an all-Black residential college to roughly 80% white.
Appalachian history documentary on the twin city the university sits above — coal, rail, and the community that built the Bluefield Colored Institute (the school features in the film's research).
Tusculum's coach-show breakdown of the 2026 Week 0 opener (Tusculum 42, Bluefield State 7) — the opponent's view of the Big Blue's season start, in the same spirit as the Concord postgame entry.
Game stream of Bluefield State College men's basketball — the Big Blue on the court, from the era before the CIAA championship-game runs.
Class of 1934 — the first Black woman elected to the West Virginia House of Delegates (1950); served eight terms, exposed coal-industry corruption, and introduced the 1956 amendment letting women serve on juries. Delta Sigma Theta.
Class of 1913 — one of the great songwriters of the 1920s Jazz Era; wrote 'Sweet Georgia Brown' (the Harlem Globetrotters' theme), 'Them There Eyes,' and 'Sugar,' recorded by Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, and Bix Beiderbecke. Helped set up Duke Ellington's first recording session in 1923.
Attended the institute in the early 1900s — a virtuoso jazz pianist who worked with Jimmie Wade and Erskine Tate in Chicago, then spent his career leading bands across Asia, including at the Taj Mahal Hotel in Bombay. Called 'one of the greatest jazz pianists that no one has ever heard of.'
Institute alumnus who returned as president (1936–1952), presiding over the 1943 name change to Bluefield State College.
Alumna and the school's Vice President of Corporate Development — the administrator who has kept the Black history flame alive, organizing the Black History Month programming and the African American Cultural Heritage Tour.
National president of the Bluefield State University Alumni Association, leading homecoming and the 'No Place Like Home' 2026 celebration.
Class of 1951, AKA — retired social worker and one of the most loyal alumni in the school's history, returning for almost every homecoming; profiled by NPR as the living face of the old Bluefield State.
Black World War II veteran and alumnus who credited the college for the life he built — seven children, all college graduates — as guest speaker at homecoming.
Miss Bluefield State — a science and pharmaceutical major whose mother had also been Miss Bluefield State; featured by NPR on the new generation's love for the school.
On February 28, 1895, the West Virginia legislature created the Bluefield Colored Institute — a 'high-graded school' for Black youth in a state whose constitution prohibited integrated public education. It was deliberately placed within 100 miles of 70 percent of the state's Black residents, on four steep acres north of the Norfolk & Western Railway's Pocahontas Division rail yards, amid the coalfields that drew thousands of Black miners to McDowell, Mercer, Fayette, and Raleigh counties. Hamilton Hatter, a former slave who became an educator, was its first leader — though the state denied him the title of president and called him 'principal' instead. He supervised the first class of 40 pupils and kept the school alive for two years with no legislative appropriations at all.
In 1906 Hatter handed leadership to Robert Page Sims, a Storer College and Hillsdale College graduate who had been his assistant principal. Sims led the institute for the next three decades — the longest tenure in school history — and was the builder who made it a college. In 1909 he made it a normal school formally training teachers; in 1928 the school began offering coursework toward the B.S. degree; and through his lobbying the legislature changed the name to Bluefield State Teachers College in 1932, reflecting the expanded mission. By the mid-1920s the campus had grown from 4 to 23 acres, with Conley Hall and the Payne dorm rising on what alumni called the 'terraced hills,' and enrollment had climbed past 600.
Under Sims the school's football team — then called the Blue Devils — became a genuine power. The Pittsburgh Courier declared Bluefield the Negro College Athletic Association national champion in both 1927 and 1928, back-to-back Black college national titles. It is the single greatest athletic achievement in the school's 130-year history, from an era when HBCU championships were declared by the Black press. The two titles are still invoked every time the modern program is discussed: interim AD Derrick Price reminded the community in 2020 that 'Bluefield State has a proud sports tradition, including two national football championships.'
Sims retired reluctantly in 1936 after thirty years and was succeeded by Henry Dickason, an alumnus of the institute — the school's first leader who had once sat in its classrooms. Dickason presided through World War II and, in 1943, another curriculum expansion brought the third name: Bluefield State College. Dickason served until 1952, the last president whose tenure predated the school's racial transformation.
The last two Black presidents, Stephen J. Wright (1953–1957) and Dr. Leroy B. Allen (1958–1965), watched the school's complexion quietly flip. In the fall of 1954 two white students enrolled — and then the G.I. Bill brought waves of white veterans to a cheap, well-regarded college just as Brown v. Board let Black students leave. The faculty, all-Black as recently as 1954, was only 30 percent Black by 1967. Nobody planned it; economics and desegregation just happened faster at Bluefield State than almost anywhere else in America.
In 1966 the state hired Wendell G. Hardway — the first white president in the school's history — and Black alumni and students felt the identity fight sharpen. Hardway was the first president to live off campus rather than in Hatter Hall, the house named for the Black founder, and by 1968 he had hired 23 new faculty members — every one of them white. To Black students who watched Black teachers disappear, it looked like the administration was deliberately remaking a historically Black residential college into a commuter college with predominantly white students.
At halftime of the 1967 homecoming football game, Black students staged a demonstration on the field to protest what they saw as Hardway's discrimination against Black faculty and students. Things got rowdy. Police were called. Students were suspended. The protest is remembered as the moment the school's identity war spilled into the open — alumni of that era still speak of it as the year the old Bluefield State ended.
On November 21, 1968, a bomb exploded in the college gymnasium. No one was injured, but the damage was extensive; Governor Hulett C. Smith offered a $5,000 reward, and a Black student leader was charged in the bombing. President Hardway responded by closing all dormitories immediately and permanently — students returning from Thanksgiving break found themselves locked out. Only 47 of the 200 residential students applied for the spring semester. The men's dorm, Payne Hall, was promptly graded into a parking lot for new commuter students; Mahood Hall, once the women's dorm, housed the business department. In one decision, Bluefield State's seventy-year history as a historically Black residential institution was over.
Before leaving office in 1973, Hardway approved a merger between Bluefield State and Concord College (now Concord University), forming a dual-campus regional college. The experiment failed, tensions flared, and the schools were separated again. Billy Coffindaffer, who became president in 1973, left in 1975; James Rowley served an interim term; J. Wade Gilley assumed the presidency in 1976 and left in 1978. It was a decade of revolving-door leadership while the college groped for a future.
Jerold O. Dugger took over in 1978 and served ten years, the longest stretch of stability since Sims. But in 1981 Dugger ended the football program, drawing fierce protest from alumni — the Blue Devils' tradition simply died, and no band, no homecoming game, no Saturday afternoons on the hill. Amid controversy Dugger resigned in 1988; Chester L. Foster served a brief interim, and Greg Adkins led from 1988 to 1993 with Leonard Nelson as acting president before Robert Moore took office in June 1993.
President Robert Moore's tenure included the school's centennial in 1995, celebrated on the floor of the U.S. Senate by Senators Jay Rockefeller and Robert Byrd, who praised the school's 'heroic story of hard-won and remarkable achievement.' The centennial-era campus was expanding into engineering technology, computer science, business administration, and the health sciences. Moore was replaced in 2002 by Albert Walker — the first African American president since 1965 — who served a full decade until 2012.
In 2003 the West Virginia Legislature created a community college system, and Bluefield State was required to hand over nearly all its two-year programs — everything except engineering and nursing — to New River Community and Technical College. The college lost roughly half its enrollment overnight and entered a slow decline, with occasional calls from state legislators to merge the college with nearby Concord University. It was the school's lowest point since the 1968 crisis.
Marsha Krotseng, chosen in 2012, was the college's first female president — and she walked into a spiral. Enrollment fell 21 percent over her final five years; a faculty vote of no confidence loomed, the City of Bluefield publicly demanded a 'complete overhaul' of the Board of Governors, and board member Bill Cole personally asked her to resign in May 2018. She resigned that December and stayed on as a special advisor through the end of her contract.
In January 2019 the board hired former West Liberty University president Robin Capehart as interim president — over the public objections of the National Alumni Association, which called his ethics 'clouded with disgrace and admitted wrongdoing' after he resigned West Liberty in 2015 under an Ethics Commission conciliation agreement. Capehart was named permanent president that September, and the board bet everything on him: Governor Jim Justice announced the return to a residential campus, groundbreaking for the first residence hall since the 1960s, twelve new athletic programs including football, and graduate programs.
In August 2020 Capehart announced the return of football to campus for the first time since 1980 — plus eleven new sports — and hired Tony Coaxum to build a program from scratch during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Big Blue played their first games in 41 years in the fall of 2021: a 14–21 loss to Lawrence Tech in the opener, then a 35–27 comeback win at Elizabeth City State for the program's first victory since 1980, a 20–12 win over Johnson C. Smith, and a 23–9 homecoming win over Fort Lauderdale. The reborn team finished 4–3 and went 4–4 in 2022.
In December 2020 the college acquired the former Bluefield Regional Medical Center property, adding 68 acres and converting patient rooms into the Medical Education Center Residence Hall — with a cafeteria and lounges built in time for the 2021–22 school year — while leasing the emergency department back to Princeton Community Hospital. Along with the new Heritage Village halls, Bluefield State became a residential university in 2021 for the first time since 1968. Enrollment, which had been bleeding for a decade, started growing again.
The West Virginia Higher Education Policy Commission approved the school's first master's program — an MBA — and the requirement that two-thirds of faculty hold terminal degrees, and the legislature approved the name change. In 2022 Bluefield State College became Bluefield State University. The next year the Big Blue were re-admitted to the CIAA for football — back in the conference for the first time in 70 years, winning the return opener 41–7 at Livingstone on September 2, 2023.
The turnaround curdled. In 2022 the university suspended the Faculty Senate and created a post-tenure review system; faculty voted no confidence, and a September 2023 Higher Learning Commission site visit produced a devastating report: 'the President and the Board of Governors of Bluefield State University do not operate with integrity in several academic and human resources functions.' Capehart announced his retirement that November, effective December 31, 2023, and the university had to appear before the HLC's Institutional Actions Council to defend its accreditation.
Darrin Martin, a member of the Board of Governors, was made interim president after Capehart and given the permanent job effective January 1, 2025. His tenure was defined by the accreditation repair job — and then by money. In 2025 the university struggled to pay vendors on time, borrowed $400,000 from its own foundation to plug gaps, and saw cash reserves fall from $6.6 million in FY2024 to $3.5 million in FY2025. On August 28, 2026, the board withdrew approval of Martin's contract, ending his employment for reasons of 'fiscal stability, internal operations and administrative oversight,' and named board vice chair Cathy Deeb as unpaid acting president while it searches for an interim.
On October 4, 2025, Bluefield State beat Shaw 35–33 on homecoming at Mitchell Stadium — the program's first CIAA win since 1954, seventy-one years between conference wins. Freshman pick-sixes, a 70-yard punt return, and a goal-line stand sealed it. For an HBCU that dropped football for four decades, left the conference amid desegregation, and went winless in its first CIAA seasons, the win was, as HBCU Gameday wrote, 'a resurrection.' In 2026 the men's basketball team reached the CIAA championship game at CFG Bank Arena in Baltimore, losing 71–68 to Fayetteville State after falling in the 2025 title game too — proof the Big Blue could now compete with the conference's best.
The in-county rivalry with Concord (Athens, WV, ~20 miles away) dates to the Blue Devils era: Bluefield State leads the all-time series 11–9 across 20 meetings. After a 35-year hiatus the schools renewed it in 2024, BSU winning 22–13 in Athens; BSU took the 2025 home game 38–31; Concord finally broke through 26–22 on September 5, 2026 in Athens. In 1973 President Hardway even tried to merge the two schools into one dual-campus college — the experiment failed within years. The old series was brutal for BSU: Concord shut them out 40–0, 42–0, and 48–0 in 1977–79, the last seasons before football died.
BSU is 8–5–1 against the Golden Bulls across 14 meetings, and JCSU has been the homecoming opponent in 2024 and again on October 3, 2026. The 2021 revival team beat JCSU 20–12 in Charlotte — the second win of the reborn program's first streak — and the 2026 homecoming matchup is carried on the CIAA Sports Network.
Livingstone was the opponent for Bluefield State's first CIAA football game in 70 years on September 2, 2023 — and the Big Blue blasted them 41–7 in Salisbury behind freshman quarterback Jai'que Hart. BSU is 5–0 all-time against Livingstone.
On homecoming 2025, Bluefield State held off Shaw 35–33 at Mitchell Stadium — the program's first CIAA win since 1954, a 71-year gap. Pick-sixes, a 70-yard punt return, and a late defensive stand sealed the resurrection win.
Fayetteville State has twice denied BSU its first CIAA men's basketball title: the 2026 championship game at CFG Bank Arena in Baltimore, FSU 71–68, and the 2025 title game loss to Virginia State before that. The 2026 final carried a coaching-swap storyline — BSU's Luke D'Alessio had won the 2022 CIAA title at FSU, and FSU's Devin Hoehn had coached BSU for four years and took it to the 2025 final before leaving for Fayetteville.
🥁 Blue Soul Marching Band · since 2024
The Blue Soul Marching Band is the largest and most noted performance ensemble on campus, playing every home football and basketball game, the homecoming parade, and community events — its members include music minors and students from across the university. The band is brand new: when football died in 1980 the old band went with it, and it only came back when football did, with Khiry Sidbury hired to build it from zero. Its deeper musical legacy predates it by a century: Bluefield was a Chitlin Circuit stop, Maceo Pinkard wrote 'Sweet Georgia Brown' after attending the institute, and Langston Hughes, Fats Waller, and Duke Ellington all performed for campus audiences.
Appointed Fall 2024 to rebuild the band from scratch — the first band director of the football-return era. BA in instrumental music education from Winston-Salem State (where he marched in the Red Sea of Sound), M.Ed. from UNC-Greensboro; former brass clinician at North Carolina Central and Director of Bands at Rocky River High School. Kappa Kappa Psi (2012) and Omega Psi Phi (2015). Athletic VP Derrick Price said his job is to 'recruit and establish a band that will rival all others in the CIAA'; Sidbury has said he intends to add a music major.
Bluefield State recognizes a smaller Greek system than most HBCUs — seven of the nine Divine Nine orgs, with Alpha Kappa Alpha and Omega Psi Phi leading the roster, alongside honor societies like Gamma Beta Phi, Chi Sigma Alpha, and Kappa Delta Pi (per the 2023–24 student handbook). Fraternity culture still echoes in the music: it was the Alpha Zeta Lambda chapter of Alpha Phi Alpha that brought Duke Ellington and his band to Bluefield for a 500-guest concert in April 1955, and Ellington returned to the city auditorium in 1966. The 2022 homecoming program included a Greek Meet and Greet ('wear your letters') and a Comedy/Greek Show.
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Capehart and Governor Jim Justice announced the return to a residential campus with groundbreaking for the first residence hall built since the 1960s — the dorm closures of 1968 were finally being undone.
Acquired the former Bluefield Regional Medical Center property, adding 68 acres to the campus. Former patient rooms were converted into the Medical Education Center Residence Hall, with a cafeteria and lounges built in time for the 2021–22 school year; the emergency department facilities were leased back to Princeton Community Hospital. The dorm reopening ended 53 years without on-campus housing.
The 1936 WPA-built, city-owned 10,000-seat stadium with FieldTurf welcomed Bluefield State football back for the first time since 1980. Bluefield State tenants: 1936–1980, 2021–present.
Completed in 1909 under President Sims; the centerpiece of the campus and still the administration building — a 2,400-square-foot columned brick building that has survived every upheaval on the hill.
The President's House, built in 1930 and later renamed Hatter Hall for founder Hamilton Hatter; added to the National Register of Historic Places. The first white president, Wendell Hardway, was the first president to live off campus rather than in Hatter Hall.
The original administrative building, named for State Senator William Mahood, the Mercer County Republican who authored the institute's sponsoring legislation. After the 1968 dorm closures, the former women's dormitory Mahood Hall housed the business department.
The Othello Harris-Jefferson Student Center anchors modern campus life — homecoming general meetings and Hall of Fame luncheons in its private dining room, the Hebert Gallery hosting art exhibits and the Sneaker Ball, and a game room for student programming.
Home of Big Blue basketball and volleyball; Alumni Night at basketball games and the annual alumni basketball game are played here, as are the hall-of-fame luncheon festivities each homecoming.
Houses the archives of the West Virginia Intercollegiate Athletic Conference — the conference Bluefield State belonged to from 1955 until it dissolved in 2013.
A second campus in Beckley extends the university's reach beyond Mercer County; the main campus is 50 acres on the terraced hills of Bluefield.
Tony Coaxum, hired in 2020, was the architect of football's return — 4–3 in the reborn 2021 season — before Davon Morgan took over in 2025. Brent Benjamin serves as Executive Vice President and General Counsel, and Dr. Ted Lewis as Provost and VP for Academic Affairs. Devin Hoehn, BSU's basketball coach through the 2025 title-game run, left for Fayetteville State in April 2026 and immediately faced his old team in the 2026 final.
Board vice chair serving as unpaid acting president since August 28, 2026, after the board fired Darrin Martin; owner of DCI Property Management, on the board since 2017.
Vice President of Intercollegiate Athletics — the former Bluefield College basketball coach tasked by Capehart with rebuilding the entire athletics program from scratch during COVID, including bringing back football and hiring the band director.
Head football coach, hired March 2025 — a former NFL safety who rebuilt the program's identity around the motto 'We Are One' after the Coaxum era.
Band Director since Fall 2024, rebuilding the Blue Soul Marching Band from zero with an eye on a new music major.
Head men's basketball coach, hired May 2026 — he won the 2022 CIAA championship coaching Fayetteville State, then took the BSU job facing his old school in the 2026 title game.
The school is rebuilding a campus culture that died in 1968. For 53 years there were no dorms, no football, no band — NPR's 2013 'whitest HBCU' report found students joking there were no step shows, no marching bands, no Black fraternities and sororities, and the average student age was 27. That is finally reversing: residential life returned in 2021, football and twelve new sports followed, the Blue Soul band launched in 2024, and 2026 homecoming (theme 'No Place Like Home') ran a full week from the On the Hill Block Party through a noon tailgate, the 1 p.m. kickoff against Johnson C. Smith, and the 'A Night on the Hill' Sneaker Ball. Alumni remain the school's beating heart — the Black alumni association keeps the old traditions alive even as the student body (72% white) looks nothing like it did.