Gun-toting guards patrol Miles College in Birmingham, but there is not much to protect. The plant is shabby, the school lacks accreditation, its 810 students can barely swing the $420 tuition. The president looks ruefully at a sprinkler outside his window and says: "I'm going to have to turn that off. I like to see the grass grow, but I have to watch the water bill."
Yet what the guards are protecting is the pride of Birmingham Negroes. Miles is the only four-year college available to most of the 2,000 youngsters who graduate each year from the area's 17 Negro high schools. It produces 60% of the city's Negro schoolteachers. President Lucius Pitts, 48, is the city's most respected Negro leader; he has made Miles a school of faith, hope and distinction. "There is no reason why Miles should fail," he says. "It has great possibilities."
On Nickels & Dimes. Miles missed its first possibility soon after it was founded in 1905. Finding coal on the campus, Tennessee Coal and Iron eased the school to another site and started a mine. That left Miles with little more than its name, which honors the first bishop of the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church, the Negro denomination that founded the school. This year the church was able to give Miles only $26,000, or less than one month's payroll. As for the rest, says President Pitts, "all these years Miles has been supported by nickels and dimes from washerwomen."
Fortunately, Pitts is an expert on bootstrap operations. His penniless father, a Georgia tenant farmer, raised eight children on peas and corn bread and dreamed of educating all of them. Pitts arrived at Negro Paine College in 1934 with $13 in his pocket, worked his way washing dishes. After two years he went blind. At length he recovered sight in one eye and quit college to "keep school" in Milan, Ga., for $47.50 a month. He saved money, but his father borrowed it—$50 here, $100 there. One day, urging him to finish college, his father produced all the "borrowed" money. So Pitts earned his degree in 1941, and his father died a proud man.
When Miles called in 1961, Pitts was executive secretary of the Georgia Negro teachers association, living in Atlanta on his and his wife's combined income of $14,500 a year. He took the job for a mere $7,500 on the theory that the challenge was worth it.
A top priority was raising a library. Pitts armed his students with tin cans so that they could dun Negro families for "a mile of dimes." Bull Connor, then Birmingham's commissioner of public safety, vetoed the drive. "What about all these kids with their tin cans?" Pitts asked, but Connor stood firm, and Pitts had to call off the drive. Incensed at Connor's meanness, people all over the country chipped in books. Yale students collected 6,000 books and delivered them personally; the Miles library now has 28,000 volumes.
New Buildings, New Teachers. Pitts has gone on to whittle away at the other handicaps that keep Miles from being accredited. He needs 17 Ph.D.s on the faculty, now has seven. He has raised $80,000 toward a $300,000 science building; endowment is up from $75,000 to $500,000. Next week, after a long struggle to get a federal loan, Pitts will break ground for a new student union and cafeteria costing $433,000.