J. Murrey Atkins, for whom Atkins Library is named, was the first chairman of the Board of Trustees of Charlotte College.
He was a member of a prominent Gastonia family that, at the time of his birth in 1906, was living in Russellville, Kentucky. His father was a teacher; other members of the Atkins family were journalists and publishers of The Gaston Gazette.
Murrey Atkins was graduated from Gastonia High School and Duke University, where he edited his class yearbook in 1927. He attended Harvard Law School and Columbia University before joining the Irving Trust Company in New York.
After five years there, he came to Charlotte as a member of the R.S. Dickson Company, then Charlotte's leading investment banking house. He served as president of R.S. Dickson from 1954 until his death in 1963.
Along with Bonnie Cone and others, Murrey Atkins believed that to maintain its progress and prosperity, the Charlotte metropolitan region had to develop a public institution of higher learning to meet the rising popular demands for higher education.
His standing in the Charlotte business community (he was among those who persuaded Stan Brookshire to run for mayor) and his financial and political contacts across the Carolinas greatly enhanced efforts to expand Charlotte College into such an institution.
