[5] Beginning in 1960, Bennett students took part in the ultimately successful campaign in Greensboro to integrate white lunch counters at local variety stores.

[6] The college launched an emergency funding campaign, Change and Progress for Bennett, to raise at least $5 million.

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.

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 slavery, and established two regional conferences).

Hearing about the college, New York businessman Lyman Bennett (1801–1879)[12] provided $10,000 in funding to build a permanent campus.

It became known in the black community as the Vassar College of the South, and Jones recruited faculty, staff, and students, from all cultural and ethnic backgrounds.

In 1937, Bennett students protested downtown Greensboro movie theaters because of their segregation, which was state law at the time, and the depictions of black women in films they were showing.

This protest during the Great Depression and under Jim Crow conditions in the South, resulted in President Jones being investigated by the FBI and other government agencies.

[13] At his invitation, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt came to the college on March 22, 1945, to meet with an integrated group of schoolchildren from Greensboro.

Other visitors to the campus included Benjamin Elijah Mays, former Morehouse College president; poet Robert Frost, and writer James Weldon Johnson.

She was the first African-American woman to be president of a four-year, fully accredited liberal arts college or university.

His speech was entitled "A Realistic Look At Race Relations," and was delivered to a standing-room-only audience at Annie Merner Pfeiffer Chapel on campus.

On February 4, 1960, close to a dozen "Bennett Belles" were arrested due to their continuing protest at Woolworth's.

[17] On April 22, 1960, The Daily News of New York broke the story of the arrests nationally, with front-page headlines and a picture of well-dressed female students entering the back of a paddy wagon without any help from the police officers surrounding it.

It reported that Greensboro police were surprised that the "Bennett Belles" had protested, as they were considered refined young women from an "elitist finishing school."

[17] President Player personally visited the students in jail, carrying assignments to them so they would not fall behind in their studies.

Miller surrounded the buildings with campus security, and brought in family and sleeping bags, changing the protest to a campus-wide "sleepover".

He collaborated with other HBCU presidents to establish the National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education, serving on the first board of directors.

He served as president for 21 years, the second-longest presidential tenure in Bennett College history, and during a period of considerable social change.

[13] Bennett underwent numerous changes under Sister President Emerita Johnnetta B. Cole, who was inaugurated in July 2002.

Former President Bill Clinton, former US Senator Robert Dole, trustee emerita Maya Angelou, and Oprah Winfrey have all assisted in fundraising.

Malveaux enhanced the overall academic curriculum, which focuses on women's leadership, entrepreneurship, communications, and global studies.

Already serving as the college's provost, Terry was made interim president for a full academic year.

She was replaced in 2019[21] by Suzanne Walsh, who was previously deputy director of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's Postsecondary Success division.

[22] In 1930, on the graduation of its first four women with a four-year bachelor's degree, the "A" rating was granted to the college by the North Carolina State Department of Education.

It began in 2003 as a "middle college", serving female 11th- and 12th-grade students who were at risk of dropping out of high school.

By 2006, with the help of The New Schools Project Reform Initiative, The Middle College expanded to include 9th and 10th graders and began offering dual enrollment.