Immediately after leaving college, President J. C. Price, the famous colored orator, invited him to join the faculty at Livingstone College, Salisbury, N. C. At this post he proved himself one of the most useful men in the faculty. At times he filled various positions in the college. The Grammar School Department, under his management, was a model department, and was the pride of the college. He taught here, serving well and at a great sacrifice, six years. Prof. Atkins retired from the Livingstone College to enter the public school work in which he had long taken a deep interest. This interest had been manifested chiefly in connection with his devotion to the work of building up the North Carolina Teachers' Association, which body he helped to organize and of which he was President for three successive years. His first extended work in this field was as Principal of the Colored Graded School, of Winston, N. C. This position of responsibility he held, with increasing success, for five years, when he gave it up, against the protest of the Board of School Commissioners of Winston, to become President of The Slater Industrial and State Normal School. This Institution had already been projected by him to meet a want among the colored people in the community which he soon saw that the public school could not meet, viz.: a deeper ethical culture and the training of the youth of the community, not only in books, but also in some useful handicraft which would the sooner furnish the basis for strong personal character and sound home-life. His first step in this direction had been the founding of the settlement known as "Columbian Heights," to serve as a background for the Institution, which would do this. The settlement was founded in 1891, and the Institution projected in 1892. Prof. Atkins, as the first settler on Columbian Heights, and as the organizer and both Secretary and agent of the Board of Trustees, pushed the work of The Slater Industrial School, encouraged and supported by the industrious efforts of the members of the Board, until in 1895 he was called to the Presidency of the Institution. From that date to the present his labors have been an inseparable part of the history of the school. Hon. C. H. Mebane, Superintendent of Public Instruction for North Carolina, says of him: "If I had fifty such men as Prof. Atkins in North Carolina, I could make a complete revolution in educational work in a short while, a complete revolution as to moral uplift and general good of the negro race."