Roy S. Johnson: An HBCU, whichever one it may be, is the ideal outcome of BSCs demise [Video]

This is an opinion column.

The Rev. Anson West was absolutely right—though I’ll swear on a stack of Bibles he didn’t see this coming.

West was among a clutter of faith-filled men striving in late 1917 to secure the future of two struggling Alabama Methodist colleges. One was the mostly male Southern University in Greensboro, Alabama; the other was Birmingham College, which opened just before the turn of the 20th century with a faculty of four and 77 students. The men decided to merge the two wheezing institutions and settle the new entity in the burgeoning metropolis that was fast becoming the bright sun in the emerging steel-making universe.

West gazed upon almost 200 acres on a hill just west of the city’s core and was said to declare: “God created that hill for the site of a college.”

He was right—a Black college.

The Rev. West, of course, did not meana Black college. Far from it. His declaration preceded the …