Aggie pride is as much a part of the Muldrow bloodstream as the corpuscles and platelets racing through father Derrick and son Louis's veins.

Before Louis Muldrow, a senior at J.H. Rose High School, was born, his father Derrick was a 1986 graduate of North Carolina A&T State University, the state's oldest historically black university. The younger Muldrow remembers a childhood full of A&T clothes, campus visits and athletic events.

"Yessir, everything was A&T," said Louis Muldrow, a running back on two of Rose's state-champion football teams. "My dad loved A&T to death."

A&T, the state's largest predominantly black university with an enrollment above 11,000, has always been on Louis Muldrow's college radar, partly because of his pedigree and partly because he loves the campus. But playing football there never seemed likely, he said, given than none of Muldrow's Rose teammates had gotten scholarship offers from the Aggies during his four-year high school career.

It was a pleasant surprise, then, when A&T offered a football scholarship, which Muldrow accepted Feb. 6. No one was happier about his decision than his father, Louis said.

"He loves it," Louis Muldrow said. "He can't stop calling his friends. He's telling everybody. He's buying so much more (A&T) gear than we already have."

Subtract the football, and you get a similar A&T story for Lavette Ford, a 1991 graduate. Ford recalled a childhood full of homecoming trips and visits to her mother's old college friends. They ultimately led her and her brother to follow their mother's steps to A&T.

"It's a family thing," said Ford, an assistant principal at South Greenville Elementary School.

North Carolina is home to 10 historically black colleges and universities, second only to Alabama among U.S. states, according to the U.S. Department of Education. The schools — five of which are part of the University of North Carolina System —enroll nearly 42,000 students, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

Alumni play a role in helping that enrollment grow. Ford organized an A&T recruitment event in Greenville two weeks ago. The reception drew more than 120 high school students, 15 of whom were admitted on the spot, she said.

Ford described her pitch to rising college freshmen: A&T has a small-town feel and quality academic programs, including one of four engineering programs in the state. It's similar to what Mary Cates tells would-be students about her alma mater, Elizabeth City State University.

"You have more contact with the teachers, get more special attention than you do at a larger university," said Cates. A 1969 ECSU graduate, Cates is the longtime president of the university's local alumni association chapter, named for Eva J. Lewis, an ECSU English professor. The local group has about 50 active members, she said.

Ford and Cates agreed that historically black schools are also more sensitive to black students' needs. While the school's history as a majority-black school wasn't a deal-maker for Muldrow, he said it did play a big part in his decision.

At A&T, "black people learn about their culture and where they came from and realize the struggles they went through just so we could have historically black colleges," he said.

"That's just another plus going down in the book," Muldrow added. "That just adds more to the school."