Clark Atlanta University

This guide to Clark Atlanta University traces the campus back to eighteen sixty-five, when the American Missionary Association opened Atlanta University to educate people freed from slavery, and to eighteen sixty-nine, when the Methodist Freedmen's Aid Society founded Clark College down the road. It follows how the two schools ran side by side for over a century before their trustees merged them into one institution in nineteen eighty-eight, and how enrollment kept sliding through the two thousands despite the merger meant to fix things. Then came one February morning in two thousand nine, when a single campus email set off a wave of job losses the administration called an enrollment emergency rather than a financial one. Walk the seam between the old Atlanta University and Clark College buildings, still standing side by side today.