So, there is a city named Grambling?
This is the typical response a Gramblinite gets after answering the question “Where is Grambling State University located?”
“The name Grambling – the city and community – is dwarfed in recognition by the world-renown school that bears its name.
Many are surprised to learn that there is a city called Grambling and a thriving community of African-Americans who have lived independently in the area for more than a century.
Grambling is an American success story created by both the best and the worst circumstances in U. S. history. Newly freed African-American captives settled here for jobs because they had few places to go. After the Emancipation Proclamation, they worked to build an independent community and fulfill the spirit of the American Dream.
A mostly African-American city and the fastest growing municipality in Lincoln Parish, Grambling has a population of more than 5,000. Grambling is the hometown of Paul “Tank” Younger, the first African-American to play football for the National Football League. This North Louisiana city also is the home of a university with the winningest football coach in the world. the legendary Eddie G. Robinson and the late Conrad Hutchinson Jr., the Grambling legend in American college band performance.
The community, however, extends beyond the limits of the incorporated city. Grambling’s growth and spiritual vitality through the years has been fed from surrounding church communities such as Mt. Olive, Liberty Hill, Mt. Harmony, Mt. Calm, Fellowship and other areas with large African-American populations. Grambling has historically been the political, economic and social hub for surrounding African-American communities.
“Blacks in this area owned large tracts of land” in the late 1800s, said Lawrence Gamer, associate professor of history at the university. Many bought land from former slave owners and rented the land to Black sharecroppers who, in turn, gave the landowners part of their crop as payment. These entrepreneurial land owners also hired Blacks from surrounding communities to tend their crops and work the land.
Many of these African-American landowners or their children were captives on local plantations before the Emancipation Proclamation. After freedom, they bought large tracks of land from their former masters, said Gamer.
These ex-captives-turned-landowners attracted other African-Americans from surrounding areas. There was opportunity here for Blacks where little existed in other places in the region and the South.
“They (Blacks) came as laborers,” Gamer said of hundreds of Blacks who migrated to the area from surrounding communities and towns throughout North Louisiana.
Gamer’s great-great-grandfather, was one of the early Black landowners who figured prominently in the history of the Grambling community -before a school was founded, according to Dr. Doris Dorcas Carter in her 1970 master’s thesis, “Charles P. Adams and Grambling College.” Carter is professor of history at Grambling State University.
“Grambling came into existence through the efforts of a number of former slaves and their children who had lived on neighboring plantations,” Carter wrote, citing the late Grambling historian Earl Maxie. According to Carter, Grambling was carved from portions of the following plantations: Sims’, Simsboro; Gullatt’s, west of the railroad running between Grambling and Ruston; Grant’s, near Cooktown Road; Cobb’s, near Vienna; and the plantations of Thomas Standifer, Charlie Green, Frank Thompson and Jim Gipson.
Grambling’s history as a distinct African-American community began in 1875 when Richmond bought a 160-acre tract from Jim Gipson, a former slave owner, Carter wrote. Gipson had purchased the land from Thomas Standifer, also a former slave owner. The land, site of the present-day city of Grambling, was later inherited by Richmond’s son, Lafayette (Fate), who became one of the founding fathers of the community that would become Grambling.
The name Grambling came from P. G. Grambling, a European American, who leased land from the younger Richmond in 1887 to build a sawmill. The sawmill was located near an area north of the railroad which runs east-west through the city and south of the present-day Interstate 20. Because of the sawmill, the train would stop in the community to pick up lumber.
The Vicksburg, Shreveport and Pacific Railroad started calling it the “Grambling stop” for P. G. Grambling’s sawmill; there- fore, the name stuck. The mill operated for about ten years, according to Thelma Smith Williams in her book, Grambling: A Pictorial History.
Carter noted that some women in the community started a movement in the early part of this century to change the name of the community to Richmond in honor of its African-American founder, but the sister of P. G. Grambling asked that the Grambling name remain in honor of her brother.
The elder Richmond and his brothers bought hundreds of acres of land and sold parcels to other Blacks who came to the area, Garner noted. This type of entrepreneurial activity by Richmond and other African-American landowners opened the way for Blacks to migrate here from throughout the North Louisiana region.
They (black landowners) provided economic livelihood for hundreds of Black families in and around Grambling”, said Garner. “People used to come from all over Lincoln and surrounding parishes to pick cotton.”
The Richmonds were among a handful of the early African-American settlers in the area who purchased land for farming and sharecropping. Sharecropping developed during the Reconstruction Era as a means for many former African- American captives and poor Whites to make a living in an agriculture-based economy.
As a result, Grambling became a major North Louisiana settlement area for African-Americans in the region and Blacks who were part of the westward migration of freed slaves from the Southeastern United States after the Civil War. Other African-Americans who owned large tracts of land before the 1900s in the area were William Reamor, Robert Youngblood, C. H. Land, Dennis Hollis, Gus May and the Younger brothers (Gene, Louis and Sherman). These men owned hundreds of acres of land and freely bought and traded in land with both Blacks and Whites. Their land formed the nucleus of an area that would later spawn the first African-American municipality in Louisiana and an internationally known African-American university.
(Reprint from egrambling.com, “The City of Grambling: Historical Information”, 2005)
Reginald Owens is the retired chairman of the Department of Journalism at Louisiana Tech University where he was the inaugural holder of the F. Jay Taylor Endowed Chair of Journalism. He also served as director of the former Tech news bureau and associate director of university communication. He also taught at Grambling State University, where he was also publication director for The Gramblinite.