Christiansburg Industrial Institute’s Campus Timeline

Christiansburg Industrial Institute operated for a century, witnessing the United States’ attempt at Reconstruction, the successful installation of Jim Crow, and school desegregation and the Civil Rights Movement.

Christiansburg Industrial Institute (CII), also known at different periods as Christiansburg Institute (CI) or Christiansburg Normal and Industrial Institute (CNII), educated thousands of African American students in Southwest Virginia from 1866 to 1966.

The school began after the Civil War in a single rented room and later transformed under the care and leadership of School Supervisor Booker T. Washington and an initial all-Black, Tuskegee-trained teaching staff

Through the decades, CII grew and thrived, becoming a symbol of resilience and progress in the face of adversity.

CI principals advocated to turn CII into a trade school as school desegregation became a national issue in the 1940s and 1950s. For reasons not yet fully understood, this never happened. Instead, the Board of Control closed the school in 1966, twelve years after the Supreme Court ruled school segregation unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education.