Morris Brown’s water was shut off and its enrollment fell to 20. Now an anonymous donor has given it $700,000.

Someone gave Morris Brown College $700,000 this week and would not give a name. The college’s president, Dr. Kevin E. James, found out and posted his thanks on Facebook. “We needed this good news!” he wrote. “To the anonymous person who just donated $700,000 to Morris Brown College, THANK YOU!!”

The gift lands at a college that was written off. Morris Brown, the Atlanta HBCU founded by the African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1881, lost its accreditation in 2002 after years of financial mismanagement. Without accreditation its students lost access to federal financial aid, and a school that once enrolled about 3,000 people began to empty out.

The collapse went all the way down. By the time James became president in 2019, enrollment had fallen to about 20 students, according to the Christian Science Monitor’s 2024 account of the turnaround. The college had gone through bankruptcy and sold 30 acres to pay down debt. At one point its water service was shut off. James told the Monitor how the repairs got done: “No one would give me any money, but someone donated a can of paint. And so the staff, we painted the walls ourselves.”

Alumni did the teaching. More than 150 of them taught free classes for two and a half years, the Monitor reported, and the college cut tuition to $4,250 a semester. Morris Brown regained accreditation in spring 2022, which restored its students’ eligibility for federal aid. By the 2023-24 academic year it had 342 students.

Black colleges took in students no one else would, and they have long been asked to survive on less. Morris Brown shows what trust can do once it arrives. A $2.9 million government grant came in 2022. The Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation gave $3 million and Chick-fil-A gave $500,000, and the college was running a $10 million capital campaign as of 2024. Its president was painting walls himself five years before that.

This is not the college’s first recent windfall, and the figures should not be confused. In January, Morris Brown announced $810,000 in funding that included a separate $700,000 federal grant secured by Rep. Nikema Williams for campus security. The new gift is a different one, from a private donor.

The college has not said what the new $700,000 is for. The test now is whether the donors who showed up this week keep showing up when the story is no longer news.