Durham, North Carolina · Founded 1910 · Eddie the Eagle
“The Eagle school on Fayetteville Street in Durham — a century-old HBCU built by a pharmacist's stubbornness, now over 10,000 students strong.”
The Sound Machine at the 2011 Rose Parade in Pasadena — the only HBCU band in the parade, chosen from over 10,000 applicants. Ties to the 2011 history entry.
Bandfest performance in Pasadena during the same Rose Parade trip — 'shook things up' in California. Ties to the 2011 history entry.
Farewell tribute to Director of Bands Thurman Hollins and family — marks the end of the Hollins era (2015–2022) and the transition to Jovan Wilson.
Halftime show from the Fayetteville State game — a good look at the modern Sound Machine field show under recent direction.
Sound Machine vs Hampton's Marching Force in a 2025 stands battle at SECU Stadium — the modern band-battle circuit the Sound Machine still runs.
Long-form interview with the men's basketball head coach on growing up in Raleigh, playing at NCCU, and building the program into a Division I contender. Ties to the basketball tradition.
NCCU Sound Machine halftime performance at a home opener — current-era band energy on the home field.
From the Yard's video feed.
From the Yard's video feed.
From the Yard's video feed.
From the Yard's video feed.
From the Yard's video feed.
NBA Hall of Famer who starred at North Carolina College before his Celtics career.
Artist behind the iconic 'Sugar Shack' painting and former professional football player.
Fashion icon and Vogue editor-at-large, a point of enormous pride for the school.
First Black mayor of Atlanta; NCCU Law graduate.
High-school football coach immortalized in Remember the Titans.
Civil-rights lawyer, director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and later NCCU chancellor.
Former North Carolina governor and attorney general — the first NCCU Law alumnus to hold both offices.
Olympic gold and silver medalist in track at the 1972 Munich Games, coached by LeRoy Walker.
Actor best known as Kinchloe on Hogan's Heroes, plus director and producer.
NCCU alum (Patrick Douthit) who co-founded the Durham trio Little Brother with Phonte Coleman and Big Pooh; Grammy-winning producer whose credits run from Jay-Z's 'Threat' on The Black Album to Destiny's Child, Erykah Badu, Mary J. Blige, Drake, J. Cole, and Kendrick Lamar — and who later returned to NCCU as its hip-hop artist-in-residence teaching the history of hip-hop.
Rapper, one-half of Little Brother.
Comedian and actress (Living Single).
NCCU alumna (B.S. in criminal justice) discovered singing in line at an NCCU cafeteria; her 2001 Atlantic debut Your Woman went gold behind the smash 'Heard It All Before,' which hit No. 18 on the Billboard Hot 100 and No. 3 on the R&B chart.
National executive director of CORE who founded Soul City, the Black-built town in North Carolina.
First Black mayor of Raleigh.
First Black woman elected mayor of Durham.
First Black Speaker of the North Carolina House.
Former NFL offensive lineman.
Former NFL defensive back.
Sociologist and published author.
Dr. James E. Shepard, a Raleigh pharmacist and Shaw University graduate, chartered the National Religious Training School and Chautauqua for the Colored Race in 1909 and opened it in Durham's Hayti district in 1910. Endorsements came from Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and Andrew Carnegie. Shepard would run the school for nearly 40 years, personally carrying the fundraising burden when private donations fell short.
To stay afloat, the school was sold and reorganized as the National Training School. New York philanthropist Margaret Olivia Slocum Sage (founder of the Russell Sage Foundation) became a major benefactor. The school kept its focus on training Black teachers in an era when Southern states barely funded Black education at any level.
The North Carolina General Assembly appropriated funds to purchase and maintain the school, making it a publicly supported institution renamed the Durham State Normal School for Negroes — a teacher-training institution. The school's grounds, buildings, equipment and debts, totaling about $49,000, were turned over to the state, and state support finally lifted the constant fundraising burden off Shepard's shoulders. Governor Angus W. McLean's backing was decisive in winning the appropriation, and B. N. Duke's gifts plus contributions from Durham citizens funded the campus expansion program the legislature authorized in 1927. Going public gave the school stable footing for the first time: just two years later it was converted into a four-year liberal arts college, and by 1927 state money and Duke's generosity were rebuilding the physical campus outright.
The legislature converted the school into the North Carolina College for Negroes, a four-year liberal arts college dedicated to educating teachers and principals. It was the nation's first state-supported liberal arts college for Black students. The first four-year class graduated in 1929.
The Southern Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools accredited the college as an 'A'-class institution in 1937, a hard-earned mark of legitimacy for a Black school operating in the Jim Crow South. Full membership in the association followed in 1957. Accreditation put the college's credits and degrees on equal footing with white institutions, which mattered enormously for graduates chasing graduate-school admission and teaching credentials.
The General Assembly authorized graduate work in the liberal arts and professions in 1939, and the college moved fast: graduate courses in Arts and Sciences began that same year, the School of Law began operation in 1940, and the School of Library Science was established in 1941. The law school opened with just four students and admitted its first women in 1944 — at a time when the white University of North Carolina would not admit Black students to its law or medical schools until 1951. The library school was authorized as a professional school at the college, with UNC's own library school director, Susan Grey Akers, serving as its part-time dean until 1946. Together the new schools made the college a genuine graduate center and a lifeline for Black professionals shut out of segregated universities.
In July 1944 the college hosted a 'race relations conference' on campus — a striking thing to stage in a segregated Southern state in the middle of a world war. Black educators, clergy, and activists used the campus as neutral ground to talk plainly about Jim Crow and the postwar future. The conference put the school on the map as a place where hard conversations about race happened out in the open, not in whispers.
The General Assembly renamed the institution the North Carolina College at Durham. On October 6, 1947, founder James E. Shepard died after 38 years at the helm. Alfonso Elder, former dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, succeeded him in 1948.
In his tenth season, coach Herman Riddick led the Eagles to a 7–1–1 record and the school's second straight CIAA championship — a 6–0–1 conference mark coming right after the program's first-ever conference crown in 1953. On December 4, 1954, the Eagles avenged their season's only loss by beating Tennessee A&I 19–6 in the National Classic in Durham, and were recognized as Black college football national co-champions. It was the first of Riddick's five CIAA titles and his lone national crown in a career that finished 112–56–11. The 1954 squad was inducted into the Alex M. Rivera Athletics Hall of Fame in 2006 as the school's first national-championship football team.
The General Assembly designated the school one of the state's regional universities and renamed it North Carolina Central University. In 1972 it joined the consolidated University of North Carolina system, with Albert N. Whiting serving as the last president and first chancellor.
When the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference was founded, NCCU was a charter member — the Eagles played MEAC football from 1971 to 1978 and won conference football titles in 1972 and 1973. The track program peaked in the same era, winning the 1972 NAIA national championship in the long shadow of coach LeRoy Walker, whose sprinters and hurdlers stocked the Olympic teams. In 1979 the school withdrew from the MEAC and returned to the CIAA, starting a three-decade conference yo-yo that would not end until 2010.
The core of the campus — eleven buildings constructed before 1940 in Georgian Revival style, including the Shepard Administration Building, Alexander Dunn Hall, and Annie Day Shepard Hall — was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1986. Most went up in the late 1930s with Public Works Administration labor: fireproof steel-truss construction behind the brick facades. The listing locked in the look of the old campus — red brick, white columns, sloping lawns — with Shepard's statue facing down toward Fayetteville Street.
On March 25, 1989, in Springfield, Massachusetts, the Eagles beat Southeast Missouri State 73–46 to win the NCAA Division II national championship — the first NCAA team national title in school history. The 27-point margin set a Division II championship-game record, and the run was a defensive masterpiece: NCCU led the nation in scoring defense (56.0 points allowed per game) and field-goal percentage defense (38.9 percent), finishing the season 28–4. Miles Clarke was named tournament Most Outstanding Player, joined on the All-Tournament team by Antoine Sifford and Dominique Stephens — who beat Sacred Heart 58–57 in the quarterfinals by sinking the first of two free throws with no time left. Head coach Michael Bernard was named the National Basketball Coaches Association's Coach of the Year, and the 1989 squad entered the NCCU Athletics Hall of Fame in 1997.
The football program stacked consecutive black college football national championships in 2005 and 2006, paired with back-to-back CIAA titles and NCAA Division II playoff runs in both seasons. It was the first time since the 1954 team that the Eagles owned the national conversation at the Black college level. The run proved NCCU could still win big in the CIAA and set the stage for the jump to Division I.
NCCU was unanimously readmitted to the MEAC in 2010, ending the 1979 split — the Eagles had been a founding member in 1971 and left when the conference moved to Division I. About 500 administrators, coaches, athletes, and the Sound Machine celebrated in McLendon-McDougald Gym, where commissioner Dennis Thomas grinned after hearing the band's 'Rock the House' riff and said, 'That band sounds like a MEAC band!' Full Division I championship eligibility began in the 2011–12 academic year.
The Marching Sound Machine was selected for the 122nd Tournament of Roses Parade in Pasadena — the only HBCU band in the parade that year, chosen from over 10,000 applicants. The 200-member band marched the 5.5-mile route after months of preparation, broadcast to more than 200 international territories.
State budget cuts — 5.4 percent one year, another $4.6 million the next — left the Sound Machine with a $50,000 annual budget for a ~150-member band, so it could not afford buses to away games. Band director Jorim Reid said the cuts hurt the university's image, since the band was NCCU's biggest marketing tool.
LeVelle Moton — the school's 1996 CIAA Player of the Year — turned the men's basketball program into the MEAC's standard-bearer after taking over in 2009. The Eagles won MEAC championships in 2014, 2015, and 2017 and punched four NCAA Tournament tickets in six years (2014, 2017, 2018, 2019). Moton passed 252 career wins to become the winningest coach in program history, and his teams made Eagle basketball a real thing in March again.
Debra Saunders-White, the first woman to lead NCCU on a permanent basis, took a leave of absence in 2016 and died that November. Provost Johnson O. Akinleye became interim chancellor and was elected the 12th chancellor in June 2017, expanding NCCU Online and community-college partnerships.
NCCU cut the ribbon on a $55.4 million, 100,230-square-foot Student Center replacing the 1968 Alfonso Elder Student Union — the oldest student union in the UNC System — plus three new residence halls adding about 1,274 beds. That December, the Eagles beat Deion Sanders' Jackson State 41-34 in overtime at the Celebration Bowl in Atlanta, claiming the 2022 HBCU national football championship, the fourth in school history.
Dr. Karrie G. Dixon, who had grown Elizabeth City State's enrollment nearly 70 percent, was elected chancellor and succeeded the retiring Johnson Akinleye on July 1, 2024. By fall 2026 NCCU topped 10,000 students for the first time, up 9.1 percent, with the UNC Board of Governors approving $20 million to renovate Richmond Residence Hall.
NCCU launched its Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Research in January 2025 with $1 million in Google.org funding — the first dedicated AI institute at an HBCU, with a purpose-built $7.2 million facility ribbon-cut in 2026 at Fayetteville and Lawson streets. All incoming freshmen now take an introductory AI module, and the school offers an AI minor through Mathematics and Physics. Chancellor Karrie Dixon framed it plainly: the goal is not teaching students to use AI tools, it is preparing them to shape the technology.
The football series dates to November 23, 1922 — A&T beat the Durham State Normal School 26–0 in Greensboro, a start date Bluford Library archives only recently pinned down (the 1924 tie had long been cited as the first). The rivalry has run hot for a century: a 1950s game moved to Duke's Wallace Wade Stadium after a brawl, a fan once drove a car onto the field and parked it at the 50-yard line, and NCCU won its first neutral-site meeting 33–30 in overtime at Carter-Finley in 2002. A&T leads the series roughly 53–34–5, but the recent decade has been dead even, both schools shared MEAC titles in 2014–15, and the 2022 meeting opened the season at Charlotte's Duke's Mayo Classic — with the Sound Machine vs. the Blue & Gold Marching Machine as half the show.
The MEAC's other anchor rivalry: SC State leads the football series 15–12, and the two have split their last eight meetings since NCCU rejoined the MEAC in 2011. The Bulldogs were the only conference foe to beat NCCU in the 2022 championship season, and they have taken five of the last nine. When the Eagles need a MEAC measuring stick, Orangeburg is usually the game that provides it.
🥁 Sound Machine Marching Band · since 1938
The Sound Machine started as a 25-piece band in 1938–39 and became a national name under Richard Jones — Yankee Stadium halftime in 1961 — then again under Jorim Reid, who took it from 32 kids in windsuits to 200 members and the Rose Parade. It plays all home football games and travels to select away games, with audiences over 80,000 at its biggest stages.
Organized student ensembles every year before a marching band existed.
Organized the first marching band, about 25 students; later became president of Fisk University.
One of the first four directors in the band's first 50 years.
Early director; returned for a second stint as director for five years and later served one year as acting director.
One of the first four directors in the band's first 50 years.
Fifth director; grew the band from 25 to 120 pieces, won national acclaim as a precision marching unit. Played the 1960 inauguration of Gov. Terry Sanford and halftime of the 1961 New York Giants–Dallas Cowboys NFL game at Yankee Stadium before 56,000 fans.
Mr. Willie Williams followed NCCU alumnus Joseph Mitchell as director of bands after Mitchell's five-year tenure, keeping the Sound Machine's post-Richard Jones momentum going through the mid-program years. After his tenure ended, Mitchell returned as acting band director for one year until Dr. Jerry Head joined the faculty. Exact years for Williams at the podium could not be verified from an opened source.
Dr. Jerry Head joined the NCCU faculty to take over the band program after Joseph Mitchell's one-year return as acting director. His tenure carried the Sound Machine between the Mitchell/Williams era and the eight-year run of fellow alumnus Xavier Cason. Exact years for Head at the podium could not be verified from an opened source.
Another NCCU alumnus, Mr. Xavier Cason, served as director of bands for eight years — one of the longer tenures in the program's modern history, per the university's own band history. His successor was Ms. Robyn Reaves, who in 1997 became the first female band director in the CIAA, ending Cason's eight-year run and bridging the program to the Jorim Reid rebuild of the 2000s. Exact calendar years could not be verified from an opened source.
Ms. Robyn Reaves became the first female band director in the Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association (CIAA) in 1997, succeeding fellow alumnus Xavier Cason. She led the Sound Machine into the 2000s — the band performed at the September 3, 2000 Eagle-Aggie Classic in Raleigh under her direction. Her tenure closed when Jorim Reid was named director in 2001; her exact end year could not be pinned to a specific date from an opened source.
Took over a 32-member band performing in wind suits; grew it to ~200, bought real uniforms in 2003 (some members wept opening the boxes), introduced corps-style marching. Six Honda Battle of the Bands appearances and the 2011 Rose Parade.
Led the band through the late 2010s; honored with a 'Thank you Mr. & Mrs. Hollins' mini-docuseries on his departure.
Former chief music arranger for the Sound Machine and ex-Delaware State bandsman; appointed interim director July 22, 2022, now Director of University Bands. Led the band at the 2022 Celebration Bowl.
All nine Divine Nine orgs are recognized by the Division of Student Affairs, plus multicultural sorority Lambda Pi Chi. The chapters most documented in the record are Omega Psi Phi's Tau Psi (dates to 1932) and Delta Sigma Theta's Alpha Lambda — both set up scholarship endowments at the university. The new $55.4M Student Center was built with dedicated fraternity/sorority space. Individual chapter names for the other seven D9 orgs could not be verified from sources checked — flagged, not padded.
Still digging this up — check back soon.
Chancellor Charlie Nelms cut the ribbon on Chidley North — a $30 million, 135,000-square-foot hall housing 517 juniors and seniors. Exact year unverified; it opened under Nelms (2007–2012).
A $25 million, 69,000-square-foot nursing building opened for the growing nursing baccalaureate program under Chancellor Charlie Nelms. Exact year unverified; it opened under Nelms (2007–2012).
A $55.4 million, 100,230-square-foot Student Center at Nelson and Fayetteville Streets replaced the 1968 Alfonso Elder Student Union — the oldest still in use in the UNC System. It holds student government offices, fraternity/sorority space, a career and professional development center, cafes and food court, an Eagle retail shop, and a 1,750-seat auditorium. Funded by a $300 annual student fee approved by students in 2014.
George Street Residence Complex, Lawson Street Residence Complex, and Alston Avenue Apartments added roughly 1,200–1,274 beds, bringing on-campus capacity to about 3,300. Built through a public-private partnership with Corvias/Provident Resources Group, with over 60 percent of subcontractor engagement going to minority-owned and historically underutilized businesses. The Lawson complex also includes a 7,300-square-foot dining facility open to all students.
A $3.555 million, 4,900-square-foot 24/7 student study and gathering space designed by Durham firm Evoke Studio, on the northwest corner of Fayetteville and Lawson streets — the 'gateway' first glimpse of campus for many coming off the highway. A large shaded porch under a dramatic canopy roof is the heart of the single-story building, dressed in Eagle colors of red brick and dark gray metal. The project also replaces the water main down Lawson Street, bringing flooding relief to neighbors; targeted for completion at the end of 2023.
NCCU ribbon-cut a $7.2 million, roughly 5,000-square-foot building for its Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Research — the first HBCU in the country to establish a dedicated AI institute and the first North Carolina college to build a facility devoted to the technology. Funded through federal Title III grants and NCCU trust funds, it holds an AI Literacy Studio, a Machine Learning and Data Science Studio, a Robotics and Emerging Tech Lab, an XR Innovation Sandbox, an Ethics and Governance Classroom, and an Innovation Atrium.
The UNC Board of Governors approved $20 million in financing to renovate Richmond Residence Hall, expected to add 250+ beds and finish in the 2028–2029 academic year. NCCU topped 10,000 students for the first time in fall 2026 and houses 43.4 percent of undergraduates on campus.
Eleven pre-1940 Georgian Revival buildings were listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1986, locking in the old campus's red-brick look for good. The district covers the Shepard Administration Building, Alexander Dunn Hall, Annie Day Shepard Hall, and five institutional buildings built under the Public Works Administration. It is the reason new construction around Fayetteville Street — including the 2023 'Gateway' center — must clear Durham's Historic Preservation Commission.
Athletic director name could not be verified from an opened source. Notable academic assets: the AACSB-accredited School of Business, ABA-accredited School of Law, ALA-accredited School of Library & Information Sciences, plus the Julius L. Chambers Biomedical Biotechnology Research Institute (BBRI) and the Biomanufacturing Research Institute (BRITE).
Took office July 1, 2024; previously grew ECSU enrollment nearly 70 percent.
Chief academic officer.
24th head coach, hired December 2018; NCCU alumnus and former defensive back/punter (1994–97). Won the 2022 Celebration Bowl and HBCU national title in his fourth season.
Head coach since 2009; NCCU's 1996 CIAA Player of the Year and third all-time scorer (1,714 points). School-record 252 career wins, multiple MEAC titles and NCAA Tournament appearances.
Campus sits about a mile south of downtown Durham and three miles from Duke, in the historically Black Hayti-adjacent corridor. Eleven pre-1940 Georgian Revival buildings form a National Register historic district. With 84 percent Black enrollment (Fall 2023) and 130+ student organizations, it reads as a tight-knit, tradition-heavy HBCU where the band and football Saturdays set the rhythm.