In January 1867 — barely twenty months after Appomattox, while the dust of the Civil War still hung over the Carolinas — a Presbyterian minister named Luke Dorland walked the dirt streets of Concord, North Carolina, looking for a building. He had been commissioned by the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) to do something the defeated Confederacy had no precedent for: open a school for the daughters of the formerly enslaved. He named the institution Scotia Seminary, after his ancestral homeland of Scotland, and modeled it on Mount Holyoke. In the years that followed, contemporaries would call it “the Mount Holyoke of the South.” History would later call it the first historically Black female institution of higher education established after the American Civil War.
That school is still standing. Its name is now Barber-Scotia College. Its campus sits on twenty-three acres at 145 Cabarrus Avenue in Concord. And in February 2026, during Black History Month, a small grassroots campaign was launched on GoFundMe under a title that, for The 144K Collective, was impossible to read as anything other than a calling: “Join 144,000 Women to Save Barber-Scotia College.”
This is the story of why we are standing with that campaign — and why we believe its work matters far beyond a fundraising goal.
A House Built “For Head, Hand and Heart”
The cornerstone of Faith Hall, the oldest dormitory on the Barber-Scotia campus, carries a three-word inscription that has been the school’s mission for more than a century and a half: For Head, Hand and Heart. Those words were chosen deliberately. The young women who arrived at Scotia Seminary in the 1870s — many of them daughters of people who had been property less than a decade earlier — were being prepared for an entire life, not merely a job: intellect, vocation, and conscience together.
The institution charted its way through American history with quiet persistence. Chartered formally in 1870. Renamed Scotia Women’s College in 1916. Merged in 1930 with Barber Memorial College of Anniston, Alabama, a Presbyterian institution founded by Margaret Marr Barber, to become Barber-Scotia College in 1932. Granted Class “A” junior college approval by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools in 1934. Conferred its first bachelor’s degrees in 1945. Opened to all students “without regard to race or sex” in 1954.
In a country that for most of that period denied Black women full access to public life, Barber-Scotia kept opening doors. Its most celebrated graduate, Mary McLeod Bethune, walked into Scotia Seminary in 1888 on a scholarship paid for by a white seamstress in Colorado who had read about the school in a leaflet. She walked out in 1894 with a vision that would carry her, in time, to the founding presidency of the National Council of Negro Women, to the leadership of Bethune-Cookman College, to a seat at Franklin Roosevelt’s “Black Cabinet” as the highest-ranking Black woman in the federal government, and finally to the U.S. delegation at the founding conference of the United Nations. She is one of perhaps a dozen Americans whose name belongs in any honest accounting of twentieth-century democracy. Her education began at Scotia.
Other Barber-Scotia daughters carried the legacy outward in their own ways: Vivian Ayers Allen, the poet, scholar, and mother of Phylicia Rashad and Debbie Allen, whose family name is one of the cultural anchors of modern American performing arts; Dr. Paulette Dillard, current president of Shaw University and a steward of HBCU leadership today. Generations of teachers, social workers, ministers, nurses, and community leaders whose names never made the textbooks but whose work made the lives in their towns more bearable, more dignified, and more possible.
This is the institution we are talking about. Not a brand. A 159-year-old house of formation.
How the Numbers Came to a Crossroads
The decline of Barber-Scotia, like the decline of so many HBCUs, was never about merit. It was about money — about the long structural shortfall in funding that has haunted Black higher education since Reconstruction. In 2004, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools revoked Barber-Scotia’s accreditation following a finding tied to academic-credit reporting and the institution’s accumulated debt. Enrollment, which had stood near 600, collapsed almost overnight to under 100. Federal financial aid, on which more than nine in ten of the college’s students depended, evaporated. Buildings began to age in place.
For nearly two decades, the institution did not so much operate as endure. And yet — endure it did. The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) continued its support. Alumni, organized through the National Alumni Association of Barber-Scotia, refused to let the books close. In 2021, Congresswoman Alma Adams helped secure forgiveness of an estimated $12 million HBCU Capital Finance loan. In January 2026, the college regained its property tax-exempt status. By fall 2025, enrollment had quietly grown back to 114 students — small, but real, and rebuilding.
In July 2023, the Board of Trustees unanimously elected the institution’s twentieth president: Chris V. Rey, J.D. A 22-year Army veteran who helped stand up the National Guard’s first cyber brigade headquarters; an attorney and former mayor of Spring Lake, North Carolina; the International President of Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity; a husband, father, and — by every account from those who know him — a man of stubborn faith. He was invested as president in August 2024. He has not stopped working since.
Rey’s framing is plainspoken. Speaking to The Charlotte Post in April 2026, he described Barber-Scotia as an institution born in the aftermath of slavery and rooted in the conviction that education is liberation. When he arrived, he said, the institution faced limited enrollment, financial strain, accreditation hurdles, and deferred maintenance. Survival was the algorithm. His team — including Senior Vice President LaToya Crawford, Provost Kenneth Taylor, Vice President Christopher Hinton, and others — reopened residence halls, brought athletics back, launched new academic programs, and submitted a reaccreditation application through the Transnational Association of Christian Schools, Colleges and Universities (TRACS).
But the work is not done, and the financial runway is shorter than the timeline. In a January 2026 video to alumni, President Rey was direct: the institution had run out of money. Many students, he noted, had enrolled without access to federal financial aid and were struggling to pay. Raising money for an unaccredited institution, he acknowledged, is not easy.
It is into that moment — that exact, narrow, urgent moment — that the campaign on GoFundMe was launched.
The Charge: 144,000 Women, One Pebble Each
The campaign is co-organized by Kirbie Speights and President Rey on behalf of the college. Speights also serves as Secretary of The 144K Collective. The page’s language is plainspoken and resolutely communal:
“This Black History Month, February 2026, we will save Barber-Scotia College. We have an incredible opportunity to come together and make history; to each be a pebble in the pond that ripples out into a vast sea! … I charge 144,000 black women to pledge $2 to save this HBCU; a foundational pillar in the history of women’s education. PLEDGE. SHARE. CONNECT OTHERS TO THE CAUSE.”
The campaign goal is $288,000. The math is the message: a small, almost casual contribution — a single donation from each of 144,000 women — would not just meet the need but more than double it. It is a model of distributed responsibility. No one woman has to save the school. No single donor has to write a transformational check. The work is shared. The legacy is shared. The dignity is shared.
By early May 2026, the campaign had raised approximately $19,317 toward its $288,000 target across 771 donations — roughly seven percent of goal. The number is honest. It also tells you exactly why this article exists. The campaign needs to be seen.
The grassroots effort has already drawn coverage from WCNC Charlotte, Inside Higher Ed, Black Enterprise, HBCU Gameday, AfroTech, and others. Local communities have stepped up alongside it: the Cabarrus County NAACP contributed $1,765; R & R Share and Care Ministry, under Bishop Robert Kinard, gave $6,600; Bethel Temple Faith Church gave $500. President Rey has reported that, between the GoFundMe and other channels, more than $100,000 was raised in the campaign’s first two weeks — a foundation, not a finish line.
The Meaning of 144,000
We are not pretending the number is a coincidence. The 144K Collective is built on it. Our entire structure is the thesis that 144,000 people, acting as equal-equity partners, can move what no individual could move alone — that a number that size, organized correctly, becomes its own kind of institution. We have spent two years arguing that case in places as different as Austin, Texas and Dakar, Senegal.
So when we encountered a campaign — co-organized by one of our own Partners — that reached for the same number to do something we believe is sacred work, we did not regard it as a marketing opportunity. We regarded it as a confirmation. Two efforts, separately conceived in their core animating images, arriving at the same number for the same reason: because real and lasting change is almost never the work of one. It is the work of many ones, each willing to be small.
Our founder Jay Davis has often said that the most common mistake in modern philanthropy is treating networking as extraction rather than contribution. The “Join 144,000 Women” campaign is the opposite of extraction. It asks for almost nothing from any single person — and it asks the question of all of us at once. Will you be one?
We think of the writer and minister Edward Everett Hale, whose words have outlived their century: “I am only one, but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something; and because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.” That is the entire architecture of the Barber-Scotia campaign. It is also, plainly stated, the architecture of The 144K Collective. We share the architecture because we share the conviction underneath it.
Why HBCUs, Why Now, Why This One
It would be possible to write about HBCU finances in the abstract. The numbers are sobering on their own: HBCU endowments collectively total roughly $4 billion — less than a tenth of Harvard’s alone. More than half of Black colleges’ total revenue depends on federal and state funds, compared with about a third for non-HBCUs. Roughly seventy-three percent of HBCU students receive Pell Grants. State-level underfunding of land-grant HBCUs, traceable to the Morrill Acts of 1862 and 1890, has been documented by the NAACP and the United Negro College Fund as cumulatively in the billions of dollars. In recent years, MacKenzie Scott has directed more than $700 million in unrestricted gifts to HBCUs; meaningful, and still — measured against the historical gap — partial.
But Barber-Scotia is not a statistic. It is a particular place with a particular story, and the story is not over. It is the school that educated Mary McLeod Bethune. It is the school whose Faith Hall cornerstone reads, in plain Presbyterian English, For Head, Hand and Heart. It is the school whose president, in his first year, reopened residence halls that had been shuttered for nearly two decades and stood in the doorway with tears in his eyes. It is, in a country with only a handful of historically Black colleges still bearing direct lineage to the immediate post-emancipation moment, an irreplaceable artifact and an active institution at the same time.
If it closes, that lineage is broken in a way no future institution can repair. That is the stake.
Our Role: Standing Alongside
The 144K Collective’s involvement in this campaign is not a bailout. We are not the savior of this story. Barber-Scotia has been saving itself for 159 years, and President Rey, his team, his Board, his alumni network, and his students are the ones doing the work. We are simply standing alongside.
What that has looked like, concretely:
One of our own — Kirbie Speights, Secretary of The 144K Collective — co-organized the GoFundMe campaign with President Rey and is helping to drive it forward. In April 2026, Collective Partner Blaquestalyon (Jay Davis), and recording artist Var Don, in collaboration with The 144K Collective and 9th Ward Production and Promotions Company, released the single “Do Wid It” on all major streaming platforms, with 100 percent of proceeds — in perpetuity — directed to Barber-Scotia College. And we are using our platforms — this site, our newsletters, The International Telegraph, and the channels of our partner network — to keep the campaign visible.
That is what sponsorship means in the Collective’s vocabulary: an expression of shared values, not a transaction. Barber-Scotia did not ask us to brand its rescue. We are not branding it. We are pointing at it. We are saying, on the record: this is one of the things that matters, and the people doing the work deserve a wider audience.
If you have followed our prior coverage — of neighborhood gas giveaways in Austin and Dallas, of our work at the NEXTEN Summit in Dakar in December 2025, of our Nexus App and our iMused.ai platform — you already understand the through-line. We believe collective economic power, when it is honest and transparent and shared, is the most sustainable way to help. Standing with Barber-Scotia is the same conviction in a different key.
A Soft Charge, Plainly Made
This article is not a recruitment piece. It is a reading of the moment we are in.
If you are receiving this as a Partner, a newsletter subscriber, or a friend of the Collective, and the story we have just told moves you the way it has moved us, the campaign is here:
gofundme.com/f/join-144000-women-to-save-barberscotia-college
The suggested gift is $2 — small enough that no one is asked to make it the center of their generosity, large enough that, multiplied by 144,000, it becomes a wall the wind cannot push over. Share the link. Tell someone who would want to know. If you have skills the campus needs — and President Rey has been transparent that the school needs everything from grounds maintenance to roofing — reach out to the college directly.
Be a pebble. Let the ripples do their work.
We will continue to follow this story. We will report what we learn. And if Barber-Scotia, 159 years after Reverend Dorland walked the streets of Concord looking for a building, finds itself once again on solid ground — accredited, enrolling, graduating — we will be honored to have stood, even for a moment, at the edge of that pond.
Our strength is our unity. Our unity is our strength. We’re here to help.
