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The Presidency of Charles N. Grandison. Dr. Charles N. Grandi—

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son served as president of Bennett College for three years, l889~l892. His appointment to the presidency was greeted with genuine pride and satisfaction on the part of the ministers of the North Carolina Confer- ence, who said,

We. . .note with unspeakable satisfaction the recognition by

the Society of the talent of our own race, as shown in the

appointment of our brother, C. N. Grandison, to the Presidency

. . a in Bennett Seminary.5

An insight into Grandison the man has been given by an admirer,

friend, and former student of his, James D. Corrothers. Grandison's

grandfather was said to have been an African chief. Grandison's wife,

according to Corrothers, was "of unmixed African blood, though college

bred.“ Corrother's comments speak of Grandison's “ruggedness,” his

courage to insist upon his rights, his honesty, courtesy, sensitivity, and his ambition for his race. He was remembered by one white man as a great orator, “magnetic, eloquent, logical, . . . a colossal ebon fig- ure, moving and melting the hearts of men at will." The “boundless" admiration in which Grandison was held by his faculty and student body,6 was shared by the Freedmen's Aid and Southern Education Society.

Their agent remarked about the l890—l89l year that “the school, under

4 . "Bennett College Has Grown Rapidly in Past 40 Years,“ Greens— boro Record, November l6, l940. Additional support for this conclusion in N. C. Conference, Minutes, 1896, p. 61.

5N. C. Conference, Minutes, l889, p. 30. 6All of the above from James D° Corrothers, In Spite of the

Handicap: An Autobiogra h (New York: George H. DoFan, 19167: BET l05- 107, H3, 111—113.