Building at Morris Brown College Auctioned Off

Morris Brown College is in downtown Atlanta. This once proud historically black college (HBCU) was founded in 1881 - one of only handful of HBCU's to have been founded by former slaves.

The luster of this small college has continued to be diminished over the years after it lost its accreditation by Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS) for shoddy bookkeeping and a shortage of professors with advanced degrees in December 2002. With the loss of accreditation, the students of the school lost the opportunity to receive any federal or state financial aid.

For the past six and a half years, Morris Brown has been scraping and scratching for survival with few students, a handful of dedicated faculty, and a big lack of money to sustain itself and its most basic needs (the water to the campus was shut off by the city of Atlanta for a bill that exceeded $350,000).

On Tuesday afternoon, what is undoubtedly the final salvo of Morris Brown College was hurled over the bow into the trash heap of history with the auction of one of its classroom buildings on the steps of the Fulton County Courthouse steps for $900,000.

What follows are excerpts from the AJC.com about the sale of Jordan Hall:

Financially embattled Morris Brown College lost a classroom building, Frederick D. Jordan Hall, to foreclosure on Tuesday.

Investors, who financed a $13.1 million construction loan for the building in 1996, bought Jordan Hall for a fraction of that sum Tuesday at a foreclosure sale on the steps of the Fulton County Courthouse. The building sold for $900,000.

What will happen to the property is unclear. Lawyers present at the foreclosure sale refused to comment. Repeated telephone calls to attorneys for the U.S. Bank Association, which represents the investors, were not returned.

“This is certainly not a great day for the Morris Brown family and the Atlanta community,” college board of trustees vice chairman Sonny Walker said Tuesday in a prepared statement. “However, the glass is not empty.”

Walker and other Morris Brown boosters spent Monday scrambling to delay the forced sale of the building one more time. Jordan Hall originally was scheduled to be auctioned on Jan. 6, but administration officials and Morris Brown boosters persuaded investors to delay that sale. They won a second reprieve in February.

The loss of Jordan Hall is likely to have little, if any, impact on day-to-day campus life, administration officials said. The college now has about 200 students enrolled, college officials said Tuesday.

“The students are in class and Morris Brown College is open for business,” Stanley Pritchett, acting president of the college, said in a prepared statement. “We are making strides toward securing interim funding which will enable us to relieve the strain of weekly financial crises … but the need for large donations is critical – especially from the Atlanta community.”

Jordan Hall, once home to the school’s Hotel, Restaurant and Tourism Administration program, is locked. Furniture and equipment is stacked inside several entrances to the building. The Ruth Hall Hodges Art Gallery, which had space in Jordan Hall, is padlocked.

Despite the sale, Morris Brown continues to owe $12.2 million for the defaulted construction loan.

Morris Brown’s financial problems go beyond that debt. The college recently averted closing its doors when Atlanta extended a Feb. 17 deadline for Morris Brown to pay $214,000 in overdue water bills.

As of last week, according to a news release, supporters of Morris Brown had raised $150,000 to pay the water bills, now due March 19.

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plez sez: i can't hold my tongue any longer... morris brown college will never return as an HBCU! it is a relic, a dusty skeleton of a dinosaur looking back at days when it had meat on its bones. morris brown college [sic] is an institution that outlived its usefulness and relevance.

when the SACS revoked morris brown's accreditation in 2002, that was the last gasp of a sick college on life support. its reputation long since in tatters, the pride of a once proud HBCU couldn't muster the energy of one last lap around the atlanta university center... its brothers and sisters at morehouse, spelman, and clark atlanta university drove past the wreck that was morris brown college as if its demise was preordained.

plezWorld knows a number of graduates of the "other" schools in the AUC; they play lip service and sob crocodile tears over the demise of morris brown college, yet still snicker among themselves that they knew this day would come, and welcome the removal of the faded purple banners and its subpar students. over the years, i've heard the derisive statements about the caliber of students who attended "mo' brown high school"!

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before turning your nose up at morris brown, the rest of the auc is also in a bit of pinch. just a few weeks ago, clark atlanta cut 70 full-time faculty and 30 full-time staffers. it combined some courses and cancelled all pe classes for the remainder of the semester. the cost to attend clark atlanta, including food, housing and tuition, is about $25,000. about 90 percent of its students receive financial aid.

and morehouse laid off about one-third of its part-time instructors... tough times can be found all over the auc. not quite as bad as over at mo' brown, but tough never-the-less.

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morris brown college was the first HBCU founded by black people... it got a noble start in 1881. at one time, this proud school stood shoulder to shoulder with the member schools in the AUC. time, decay, neglect, and misappropriation of federal funds slowly sucked the life from the school. plezWorld arrived in the ATL in the early '80's to attend georgia tech; morris brown was already on the decline. it was the joke of the auc when i showed up in atlanta.

enrollment in 2008 is struggling to stay above three digits - i sat in undergraduate classes with more students than the entire enrollment of morris brown. i don't know anyone with a college age student who would send their child there. the water to the campus was temporarily shut off in december 2008 (the school is still over $200,000 in arrears on its water bill). a handful of supporters have taken to collecting money from motorists who pass the campus in a vain attempt to save the school. every month or so, i get an e-mail message with an appeal to contribute money to the lost cause that is mo' brown. there are less than 10 faculty at the school. a degree from the school isn't worth much more than the paper it's written on. i'm afraid that the auctioning off of jordan hall was merely a public acknowledgement that old mo' brown has finally hit rock bottom.

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i propose a re-purposing of the school. for the past 20 years, it has been an unmitigated failure as an institution of higher learning, maybe it would fare better as a prep school or a boarding school for at-risk youth? make it an attractive alternative school that prepares young black boys to attend college. it has been little more than a glorified high school of late, it may as well seal the deal and make it official.

there are billions of dollars in the Obama Stimulus Package for education. maybe morris brown could re-purpose itself to be a trade school for those who want to become certified for work in the new green economy? the school has classrooms, dormitories, and a cafeteria... the only thing it's missing are new students. this is a new day and morris brown needs to move away from the faded 19th century HBCU model to a purpose that is more relevant to the 21st century.

plezWorld welcomes your thoughts and opinions...

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Read the AJC.com article about Jordan Hall being auctioned off.

Read the AJC.com article about Morris Brown's BIG A$$ water bill.

Read the AJC.com article about Clark Atlanta's woes.

Read the AJC.com article about cuts at Morehouse.

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Another HBCU on the Brink?

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that Clark Atlanta University in the Atlanta University Center (the largest African-American consortium of higher education in the United States), also known as the AUC has implemented a hiring freeze and cut back on raises to save money after about 240 fewer students than expected enrolled during the school's chaotic fall registration, school officials said this week. There are reports that there has been a 5 percent drop-off in undergraduate enrollment and an 11 percent dip in graduate student enrollment, to 4,271 total students.

With tuition and associated costs at over $30,000 per year, about half of the students who did not enroll cited issues with financial aid or housing.

Read the entire AJC article here.

Another Atlanta University Center school - Morris Brown College - was mired in a financial aid scandal which caused the school to lose its accreditation in 2002 (meaning students cannot receive federal or state financial aid for their school expenses). As of the Fall 2007 semester, Morris Brown College is scratching for survival with fewer than 100 students and a handful of faculty members. It appears that the only two viable colleges left in the AUC are all-male Morehouse College and all-female Spelman College.

All of the member schools in the Atlanta University Center are Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU). Most of the schools began as small glorified training schools to educate freedman after the Civil War and have a rich, long-standing place in the annals of African-American history. Prior to the 21st century, most African-American students who went to college were educated at an HBCU.


plez sez: everything has a time and a place. our oldest HBCU's served the Black community and America at a time when this country didn't know what to do with its newly freed chattel. when southern colleges and universities would not open their doors to Black Americans for close to a century after the end of slavery, these HBCU's were there to educate, motivate, and uplift the race.

i'm afraid that in the 21st century, the time for many (if not most) of the HBCU's has passed. the top students that once had limited opportunities to attend college now have a vast array of choices, most state universities have better/newer facilities, better trained faculty, more financial resources, lower tuition costs, better networking opportunities, and a global student population that cannot be found on a majority of the HBCU's. the issue of strained budgets, higher percentage of students needing financial aid, over-inflated faculty salaries, and dwindling student population is not confined to Clark Atlanta University. these same financial woes drove the administration of Morris Brown College to embezzle federal funds to keep that school afloat for as long as it did, and now it sits barely functional as an institution of higher learning and more a shell of its former tenuous existence.

look at a list of top colleges and universities in the United States and you'll wonder if these 114 historically black colleges even exist. save a handful of these schools (ex. Morehouse, Spelman, Howard, Hampton, Fisk, and Tuskegee), most HBCU's are irrelevant when speaking about HBCU's! in a country where Black people are no longer the largest minority, segregating our students in an educational ghetto is not uplifting the race. my two oldest brothers attended HBCU's, the quality of their education was vastly inferior to the education that the rest of my siblings and plezWorld received at mainstream universities. most of these schools are small (less than 10,000 students), private (with costs over $30,000 per year), old (most are over 100 years old), and financially strapped (with low alumni support).

read the HBCU Ranking in the US News & World Report.

i am thisshort of proposing the dismantling of the current HBCU "system," but i would entertain the contraction of the system. combine schools, such as those in the AUC into a larger more viable university. instead of having 4 small colleges, why not create one much larger university that reduces redundant function, cuts out the waste, and enhances the college experience. instead of Morehouse, Spelman, Clark, and Morris Brown as separate schools, create the Atlanta University. for those traditionalists, each campus could maintain a portion of their traditional identity (similar to what is done at Rutgers University in New Jersey), while having a student population that can support a true educational institution of higher learning.

similarly, this model can be extended around the country where traditional HBCU's can be absorbed or contracted into larger more viable HBCU's or mainstream state universities (for example, combine Florida A&M University with Florida State University, and combine South Carolina State University with University of South Carolina).

if you are a graduate of a HBCU, you will probably think what i wrote is heresy, but change is constant and inevitable. when one looks at the current state of HBCU's in the United States, to my way of thinking, it would be wise to be the cause of change rather than letting the change happen to you! the issues at Clark Atlanta University and Morris Brown College are not unique within the HBCU community, and it is only a matter of time before more and more of these historical educational monuments begin to disappear into the dust from which they arose.


plezWorld family education. My two oldest brothers graduated from HBCU's: Hampton Institute (now Hampton University) and Virginia State College (now Virginia State University). My third brother and sister graduated from University of Pennsylvania (Penn undergrad and medical school) and Rutgers University (The State University of New Jersey), respectively. My niece graduated from Old Dominion University (ODU). My mother-in-law and father-in-law graduated from Clark College (now Clark Atlanta University). My wife's brother graduated from Kansas State University. My wife graduated from University of Georgia (UGA). I graduated from Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) which is just a few miles from the AUC.

Neither of my parents attended a four-year college or university, but as you can see, they were fanatics about ensuring that all of their children were college graduates.