A faded postcard, dated July 16, 1918, and mailed to Mrs. C.W. Seifert of Austintown, Ohio, by her son with questionable handwriting, reads:
“Dear mother, I always said I would see half the world. I guess I am, so don’t worry. I am with the Youngslows’ boys. We are all happy, you may as well be. We are glad we left the South… With love to all, [your] son C.P.S.”
The front of the postcard, stamped in Danville, Virginia, features a grand stone building with towering spires. It was not simply a church but Immanuel Lutheran College. Now, the only evidence of the awe-inspiring structure is relics tucked away into two Greensboro churches, documents logged in historical archives, and in the fond memories of those few remaining people who knew it well. But its influence is still felt well beyond Greensboro.
The story of the Lutheran Church begins more than 500 years ago, in October 1517, with Martin Luther’s legendary nailing of his 95 Theses on Wittenberg’s All Saints’ Church doors, openly questioning Catholic dogma and sparking the protestant reformation. Luther believed salvation came through faith alone, and could not be paid for through Earthly works—a radical shift during a time when some clergy were convincing their congregants that buying church-approved certificates—indulgences—would wipe away their sins and reduce their time in purgatory.
Today, there are 6.8 million Lutherans in the United States.
As with many Christian denominations, Lutherans were motivated to spread the good news to all corners of the world—and all the way to Greensboro, North Carolina.
Like many faiths, Lutherans wanted their own schools, to teach their own ministers, and to keep their children’s minds from being corrupted by the secular world.
But until Brown v. Board of Education officially paved the way for school integration in 1954, most institutions were legally segregated, as were many churches by culture or tradition. Black ministers led Black churches, while white ministers headed white churches.
In a 1905 handwritten history of Immanuel Lutheran College, Rev. John C. Schmidt detailed how in 1896, he sent Stuart Doswell, a young Black ordained minister, to Concordia Seminary in Springfield, Illinois, to be trained as a Lutheran minister. Over the next few years, Schmidt sent 10 more Black students from Greensboro, revealing a need.
“It soon became evident to us…that Springfield was not the ideal place for the higher education of col[ored] pastors and teachers,” Schmidt explained. The climate was too severe, the mission field too far, and the travel expenses too great. It became difficult to persuade Black students to go so far away to become servants of the Word, Schmidt wrote.
It was clear to Schmidt that the South needed a Lutheran college for Black ministers.
There was also a language barrier. The Springfield classrooms only spoke German.
“When German immigrants came to the U.S., they were afraid that they would lose their theology if it was translated into English, even though the only reason that Lutheran theology existed was because it was translated from Latin, Greek, and Hebrew into German itself,” said Rev. Warren Lattimore, a pastor at Grace Lutheran Church in Greensboro and an assistant professor at Duke University, where he is completing his doctoral degree and studying religious African American biography amid Jim Crow.
Schmidt reached out to Rev. R. Kretschmar, secretary of the Hon. Missionary Board of the East Lutheran Synodical Conference of North America at St. Louis, Missouri. Kretschmar brought the idea to the 1898 Synodical Conference, but Schmidt wrote, the idea of a Black Lutheran college was “too new in our midst, even among friends of the col[ored] Lutheran mission.”
The conference postponed the school’s establishment until 1900, when it decided that a “separate institution for the education and training of col[ored] youth, with the view of sending them as missionaries and teachers among the people of their race” would be established in Concord, N.C. In 1903, Immanuel Lutheran College started teaching its first students, aged 14-27. By the next term, girls were also admitted to the school.
As the number of students outgrew the school’s walls, the institution moved to Greensboro, settling on four acres near the city limits in 1905.
In addition to the seminary, the campus had a high school where students learned Latin, chemistry, physics, geometry, history, and more. Immanuel Lutheran also had a junior college that taught standard college and teacher-training courses. The space had a high school and junior college building, an administration building for the seminary, a gym and dormitory complex which was constructed in the late 1950s, and an old army building that served as student housing and a dining hall.
While the school gave Black students opportunities, it was also born of segregation, and the writings of those leading the college—white faculty and clergy—certainly reflected that.
“[The college] is confident that those who have been educated on the basis of Christian principles will also in other occupations exert a beneficial influence upon the race, and by their superior Christian knowledge bring others unto salvation and thus be instrumental in helping to solve that ‘problem’ which for years has occupied, and still occupies, the minds of men,” reads a small catalog for the college from 1909-10.
“The ‘race problem,’ however, must be solved by the race itself,” the pamphlet continued. “White philanthropists and friends of the Negroes, South and North, can only point the way and help them to achieve success. But the solution of social problems of the present age, as in ages past, lies in the thorough Christianization of the people generally and the thorough Christian training of the children and the youth. Train up a child in the way he should go; and when he is old he will not depart from it.’”
Schools for Lutheran clergy and other students were often fully subsidized by the church. But after the Great Depression, funding trickled, and there was internal debate about which schools to close. Immanuel Lutheran College was on the chopping block as early as the 1930s, Lattimore said.
However, church leaders realized that if they closed the school, the students would have to go to the white Lutheran seminaries.
Given the history of Jim Crow and segregation, those seminaries weren’t quite ready to have Black students among their student body, Lattimore said.
“They reconsidered their decision to close the school based on segregation and kept it open for a couple more decades,” he said.
Over the years, hundreds of students graduated from the school. Among those from Immanuel Lutheran’s high school was James Cheek, president of Howard University from 1968-89.
Once desegregation policies took effect, Black students could legally go to white schools. But the effort to integrate schools in the aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education led to the mass closure of schools that served predominantly Black students. This school closure disparity exists to this day, and can be seen in the data that shows majority-Black schools are more likely to be shuttered than non-majority-Black schools, and the impact that school closures in Black communities can have.
Discussions from both the progressive and conservative ends of the Lutheran church’s leadership ultimately led to Immanuel Lutheran College’s closure.
“The progressives thought that closing historically Black colleges would lead to greater integration,” Lattimore said. “Whereas those on the more conservative end—who might have been more pro-segregation—didn’t like the idea of their money going to fund Black colleges or schools.”
In 1965, the land was acquired by North Carolina A&T University—now recognized as its East Campus. A historical marker on the corner of E. Market Street and Benbow Road near Morrow Hall and Blount Student Health Center commemorates the college.
Without a campus to return to, alumni like Eula Whitley—who graduated in 1949 with an associate degree—were left without the anchor that so many other college graduates enjoy.
“It’s just gone,” Whitley told the Greensboro News & Record in 1998 at the college’s reunion. “There is nothing we can do about it,” she added.
And there’s so much more that could’ve been, Lattimore said, as evidenced by the school’s last graduating class.
“It had among its graduates some people who became leaders in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, and their first white graduate,” Lattimore said, “The school itself was desegregating amid its forced closure.”
“It speaks to the potential if the school had remained open,” he said. “Because if these people had such an impact on the history of the Lutheran Church, imagine what another class would’ve done.”
What Remains
While Immanuel Lutheran closed in 1961, the school’s impact lives on in Greensboro in artifacts, churches, and people who keep its memory alive.
But two Lutheran churches in Greensboro that were also born during segregation carry on Immanuel Lutheran College’s legacy.
In 1894, Schmidt started a small congregation in Warnersville, which officially became Evangelical Lutheran Grace Church in 1897. In 1928, the church joined with Immanuel Lutheran College’s Luther Memorial Church and became Grace Lutheran Church, which now resides on East Washington Street
White Lutherans attended Ebenezer Lutheran Church on Walker Avenue while Black Lutherans attended Grace Lutheran Church. To this day, the two congregations’ racial makeup remains largely similar
Ebenezer Lutheran was started primarily by the white faculty at Immanuel Lutheran College in 1907, said Dan Koenig, a pastor for Ebenezer from 1975-2010. Koenig also filled in at Grace Lutheran when there was a vacancy. Koenig attended Concordia Seminary in St. Louis, Missouri, and eventually left the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod over its swing to the right and the church’s practice of closed communion.
“Christian nationalism is a problem for Jesus, it’s a problem for the Christian faith,” he said. “You can’t pick out who you want to hate. Sometimes I hear what Jesus teaches as much from people who aren’t going to church as the other way around.”
In the mid-1960s, a rift in Ebenezer surfaced when one of its pastors invited Black children to attend Vacation Bible School. More than a dozen church members made an exodus. Some of the angrier members didn’t go to another church once they left, Koenig said.
“When I came here in 1975, the town was pretty well segregated,” he said. “You had Black churches and white churches. You had an occasional Black member at white churches and a white member at Black churches.”
A Legacy
Immanuel Lutheran College changed lives, and the decision to educate its future ministers in the English language helped spur the Lutheran Church into what it is today.
“Theology is translation enabling imagination,” Lattimore said. “To truly do the work of theology or share good news to other people, you have to translate it so that people can imagine it. If you say all the right words, but it doesn’t mean anything to them, it doesn’t connect.”
Many of the school’s relics live on at Grace Lutheran, including the bell, cornerstone, and a few benches. A few of the organ pipes live at Ebenezer Lutheran, although they’re out of commission and serve a purely ornamental purpose now, sentimentally affixed to the church’s walls.
And if you look closely at the century-old wooden pipes, you’ll see that the itch to scratch one’s name into objects is timeless, such as one by “Butch from St. Albans, N.Y.,” who etched his name into perpetuity.
“Even Lutheran seminarians 100 years ago liked to scratch graffiti into organ pipes,” said Jeff Perrier, who sits on Ebenezer Lutheran’s organ committee.
Many in Greensboro still remember their own family’s connection to Immanuel Lutheran and the network of people it connected throughout the city, the region, and the country.
“Oftentimes, African Americans’ connection to the Lutheran church happened with schools,” Lattimore said. “So this idea of pouring into the children, through education, through imagining a better world, through being able to become teachers and pastors, within the community and beyond, was a major thrust: That the local church was a local family that cared about people.”
“In the era of Jim Crow,” Lattimore said. “Where there is economic poverty, rampant racism, violence, and so forth, to have this idea that God’s love for you is unconditional and it’s not tied to the circumstance of your life is something that I think Black Lutherans particularly appreciated. Especially in connection with the value of education that the Lutheran Church placed.”
That veered from some other Christian denominations, Lattimore said, where a person’s success was a sign of how much God loved them.
“This idea of grace that’s not based on what you do, how smart you are, or how much you’ve accomplished,” Lattimore said. “None of that matters in the sight of God.”
This chapter of Postmark was written with deep gratitude to N.C. A&T University’s archives staff, the congregations and clergy of Grace and Ebenezer Lutheran churches, Rev. Warren Lattimore of Grace Lutheran Church, former Rev. Dan Koenig of Ebenezer Lutheran Church, and the Greensboro History Museum.