ATLANTA (NNPA)—Despite what many see as an impossible economic hill to climb, those in charge of the sinking ship named Morris Brown College have vowed to go down fighting. Their new president, Charles Taylor, continues to assure alumni, friends and naysayers that the school will survive, accreditation or no accreditation.

"I wanted to make sure that the message was clear that we intend to keep Morris Brown open and functioning," he told about 100 alumnus and friends of the college at a recent rally to kick off a five-year, $50 million fundraising effort. "I want to welcome you to what might be the new beginning for Morris Brown Christian College, where we will begin to get back to our roots and understanding that as a college, we have not only to teach young people how to earn a living, but teach them how to live."

The school is attempting to win appeal of a December decision by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools to yank Morris Brown’s accreditation. Mr. Taylor, a past college president and business owner, is not trying to minimize the circumstance that Morris Brown finds itself in.

"We have problems but we are working them out," he told the rally. He touched lightly on a "plan" he and administrators he has brought aboard have worked out to get the school out of financial quicksand.

"The plan calls for us to address the financial and operational challenges facing the college," Mr. Taylor said. "A big piece of the plan involves raising $50 million over the next five years to liquidate the debt and to place in an endowment fund the resources necessary to make sure that the school will be here in 2026 when Imani (his goddaughter) graduates in 2026 and beyond."

Mr. Taylor did not provide specific details, though a published report several weeks ago indicated that an advisory panel had been established to assist with fundraising. The Atlanta Voice newspaper is also checking out an unconfirmed report that the University System of Georgia has inquired about possibly acquiring the college and either making it a fourth Black state school or an extension of an existing school such as the University of Georgia.

Mr. Taylor exited the campus immediately after delivering his address at the rally and declined interviews.

This is a story that many alumni and students have heard before. In 1994, when news media reports disclosed that the school was $10 million in the red and a banana peel away from being padlocked, a team of administrative "saviors" were brought in and a fundraising drive was launched to get the school back on financial straight street. Many gave money, with the assurance then that it represented the last time that the school would find itself entangled in financial kudzu.

Morris Brown, a 121-year-old institution that once raised money just after the turn of the century by selling Octagon soap, has teetered on the edge of ruin in the past. In the 1930s, the school almost went belly up and survived only after some quiet intervention from unlikely sources, including former U.S. Sen. Herman Talmadge, who fought integration of the University of Georgia.

But there is also the thinking that Morris Brown deserves to survive, if for no other reason than it is the only school within the five comprising the Atlanta University Center that was founded by Blacks and named for a Black (AME Bishop Morris Brown).

Back during the days when few Black colleges built their own sports stadiums, Morris Brown took a virtual hole in the ground between Vine Street to the east and Sunset Avenue to the west and erected Herndon Memorial Stadium, which provided venues for Morris Brown, Clark Atlanta University and Morehouse football teams and the city’s predominately Black high schools for more than 40 years.

"We’ve always known struggle," said Herman "Skip" Mason, a dean at the college, past graduate and pastor of the Hopewell CME Church in Atlanta’s Mechanicsville community. "We have not had the major philanthropic dollars of the Rockefellers at Spelman and other folks at other institutions. Morris Brown has put out more principals, teachers and at one point, had produced more CPAs than any other Black college in the nation."

But can Morris Brown be saved? Should it be saved? Why care, lament many who contend that graduates of the school seem indifferent at best and have allowed their alma mater to get in the financial mess its in?

Noted civil rights icon C.T. Vivian, who has a son that attended the college and who has received an honorary degree from the school, suggests that Black America cannot afford to let the school die.

"I came to work because Morris Brown has been working for us for 120 years," Mr. Vivian said. "It’s worth working for. It can’t stop now because it’s needed now. I did my thing in my decade. Now every one of us has to do the thing for their decade.

"But, no matter which decade you lived in, this is the time for you to keep institutionalized what the AME Church had the vision to do. A people without institutions are not a people at all. If you lose the institutions you have, you can’t blame anybody else."