Book Description

Hail to UNCP! recounts one of the most unique and compelling stories in higher education--a school founded in 1887 to train Lumbee Indian teachers that evolved into a four-year university and constituent institution of the internationally acclaimed University of North Carolina system. The University of North Carolina at Pembroke had humble beginnings with fifteen students and one teacher. As the only state-supported, four-year college for American Indians in the nation (1939-1953), the institution successfully navigated the challenges of internal and tribal factionalism, budget crises, Jim Crow segregation, the Great Depression, integration, and rapid expansion, to grow into a campus with more than 6,200 students--recognized today as the most diverse in North Carolina and the southern United States. The book details the extraordinary spirit of the institution and the courageous foresight of Lumbee leaders who struggled to establish the school during challenging times following the Civil War and Reconstruction. Hail to UNCP! also focuses on what the institution has meant, and still means, to the Lumbee people, to students and alumni past and present, and to the people of the area it serves. This remarkable story highlights luminaries from the institution's history and the defining moments that shaped the interconnected histories of the institution, the Lumbee and other Indian peoples, and southeastern North Carolina. Hail to UNCP! was awarded a 2014 Willie Parker Peace History Book Award by the North Carolina Society of Historians.