The 1967 edition of The Golden Bull, the Johnson C. Smith University student yearbook, celebrates the centennial of the school with an excellent history of the university. One of the artifacts featured in the historical sketch is this rather unassuming looking chair. In 1909, President William Howard Taft gave a speech to the faculty and students at the university. In surveying the setting prior to the President’s arrival, the Secret Service raised what must have been a delicate subject: the school did not have a chair large enough to hold the famously rotund President. The faculty quickly pooled their money and purchased an extra-large chair in time for Taft’s visit. The chair has remained at the school, known thereafter as the “President’s Chair.”