John Gregg Fee (1816-1901) was born into a Presbyterian slaveholding family in Bracken County, Kentucky. After receiving an education at both Augusta College in Bracken County and Miami University of Ohio, he studied at Lane Theological Seminary in 1842 and 1843. In 1844, he married Matilda Hamilton who, like Fee, was a devoted abolitionist. Fee then returned to Kentucky, where he preached against slavery. In 1854, with the help of Cassius Marcelus Clay, Fee founded the town of Berea, Kentucky. In 1855, against the backdrop of the end of the Mexican American War, passage of the Missouri Compromise (authorizing and funding the Fugitive Slave Law), and the formation of the Republican Party for the abolition of slavery, Fee established Berea College the first interracial and coeducational college in the state.

Berea College began as a one-room schoolhouse, which also served as the local church. Fee modeled the school after Oberlin College of Ohio and hired a number of teachers from Oberlin as the school expanded.  Fee and other Berea College founders believed that opposing slavery without opposing the American caste system would continue to breed social inequality. From its founding, the college was an anomaly -- an interracial, co-educational, cohabitating institution, opposed to slavery and caste within an antebellum, slaveholding South. To break the system of caste, the school founders committed themselves to providing a church and free education to all. Basing his argument for inclusive education on a strict understanding of the Christian gospel, in 1847 Fee published an antislavery manual in Maysville, Kentucky. His writing advocated the oneness of the entire human race, an extremely controversial belief in his day, in which he stated "God hath made of one blood all nations of men."