27, 2019, Bennett announced that Suzanne Walsh would be its new president.
== History ==
Bennett College was founded on August 1, 1873, as a normal school for teacher training. It opened with seventy African-American men and women (freedmen, or former slaves). The school's founder, Albion W. Tourgee, was a Civil War veteran and jurist from Ohio who worked in North Carolina during Reconstruction and championed the cause of racial justice.
The school held its inaugural classes in the basement of Warnersville Methodist Episcopal Church North (now St. Matthew's United Methodist) in Greensboro. Bennett was coeducational and offered both high school and college-level courses, to help many blacks compensate for their previous lack of educational opportunity. The year after its founding, the school became sponsored by the Freedman's Aid Society and Southern Education Society of the northern Methodist Episcopal Church (like the Baptists, the Methodist churches had split in the years before the war over the issue of …
