Montgomery, Alabama · Founded 1867 · Hornets (Lady Hornets)
“The school the bus boycott was mimeographed in — and home to one of the biggest bands in the SWAC.”
Recorded at Carver High School in Montgomery for the 1978 MMH album 'HalfTime with the Mighty Marching Hornets.' A rare audio window into the band nearly 50 years ago — the members hum the alma mater before playing it, a ritual for stressful games.
Full 2014 halftime show vs. Alcorn under Dr. James B. Oliver — the classic Oliver-era field show at peak form.
The 2015 Magic City Classic halftime show against Alabama A&M — the rivalry showpiece, shot in full at Birmingham's Legion Field.
Head-to-head halftime battle between the Mighty Marching Hornets and Southern's Human Jukebox, October 10, 2015. ASU won the HBCU Sports fan poll 79.7% to 20.3%.
Field-level view of the 2022 MEAC/SWAC Challenge halftime vs. Howard in Atlanta — full band, Stingettes, and Honey-Beez sequence.
The 2026 Labor Day Classic halftime show vs. Lane College — the first season under new director of bands Dr. Derrick Smith, who succeeded James Oliver after his December 2025 retirement.
From the Yard's video feed.
From the Yard's video feed.
From the Yard's video feed.
From the Yard's video feed.
Class of 1950, B.S. in sociology — civil-rights leader who organized the Montgomery bus boycott beside Dr. King and co-founded the SCLC.
Clergy and civil-rights legend, class of 1951; SCLC co-founder and Birmingham movement leader — the dining hall on campus is named for him.
Class of 1951 attorney who represented Rosa Parks during the Montgomery bus boycott; his work helped end bus segregation nationwide.
Civil-rights activist and the named plaintiff in Browder v. Gayle, the case that desegregated Montgomery's buses.
Class of 1956 — mayor of Chicago from 1987 to 1989.
Civil-rights activist and first chairman of the Alabama Democratic Conference; the Acadome carried his name from 1992 to 2008.
Jazz trumpeter who directed the Bama State Collegians in the 1930s before 'Tuxedo Junction' made him famous.
Jazz and funk trombonist known for his work with James Brown in the 1960s and 1970s.
Class of 1960 soul singer and musician behind the hits 'Strokin',' 'Patches,' and 'Snatching It Back.'
The 37th Secretary of State of Illinois.
Class of 1992 comedian and actor.
Class of 1993 actress, known for The WB's Felicity.
Rapper who played two seasons of basketball while attending ASU.
Class of 2006 NFL quarterback who played for the Seattle Seahawks; fourth all-time in ASU passing with 4,898 yards and 38 touchdowns.
11-season NFL linebacker who started for the Titans in Super Bowl XXXIV; returned to ASU as head football coach.
Class of 1996 former NFL wide receiver and football coach.
Class of 1981 former NBA player for the Kansas City Kings and San Diego Clippers.
Early Black graphic designer, educator, and curator.
Nine formerly enslaved people in Marion, Alabama, put up $500 to found the Lincoln School of Marion as a private school for Black students. It was incorporated July 17, 1867, and opened November 13 with 113 students. In the thick of Reconstruction, a community with almost nothing built a school from the ground up — and named it for Abraham Lincoln.
After a legislative act authorized the state to fund a normal school, the State Board accepted title to the school in December 1874 and George N. Card was named president. The Lincoln School became America's first state-supported educational institution for Black students — a public school for Black children, funded by an Alabama government, just nine years after the Civil War. That day set the template for the school's whole identity: a teachers' college, and a public one.
Paterson, a Scot who came to Alabama as a teacher, became the second president and held the job 37 years — 37 of the school's first 48. He is honored as a founder of the university in his own right. He pushed the move from Marion to Montgomery, betting the school's future on the state capital, and kept a fragile Black school alive through the end of Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow.
The school opened in Montgomery in 1887, but an Alabama Supreme Court ruling forced a name change: the 'Lincoln Normal School' name went, and the Normal School for Colored Students arrived. The new campus site was chosen in 1889, though preparing the buildings took longer. The message of the era was written into the name itself — the state would fund the school, but only as a segregated one.
Alabama State and Tuskegee first met on the gridiron in 1901, but in 1924 the schools moved the matchup to Thanksgiving Day — creating what is considered the first Black college football classic. The Turkey Day Classic grew into a Montgomery cultural institution: parades downtown, alumni reunions, and a Battle of the Bands that became a headline event on its own. For generations of families, Thanksgiving in Montgomery started with this game.
The school grew into a junior college and in 1928 became a full four-year institution, renamed State Teachers College in 1929. The four-year upgrade mattered: ASU could now grant bachelor's degrees, and its graduates — overwhelmingly teachers — fanned out across Alabama's segregated schools. In 2004 the university was noted as the nation's number-one producer of African-American teachers.
In the 1930s the Bama State Collegians, the school's big-band jazz orchestra, were directed by trumpet player Erskine Hawkins. After moving to New York, Hawkins turned the Collegians into the Erskine Hawkins Orchestra and cut a string of national hits — 'Tuxedo Junction,' 'After Hours,' 'Tippin' In.' 'Tuxedo Junction,' also recorded by Glenn Miller, became one of the anthems of World War II, and the school's jazz tradition dates its pedigree to that band. In 2011, Hawkins' start in the Bama State Collegians was the subject of the Florida State film-school thesis film The Collegians, written and directed by ASU alumnus Bryan Lewis.
The state renamed it Alabama State College for Negroes in 1948 and Alabama State College in 1954. The 1954 change quietly dropped the racial designation just as Brown v. Board was being decided — the names track, in miniature, the arc of segregation law. Alabama State would keep 'College' for another 15 years before finally winning the 'University' name.
ASU English professor Jo Ann Robinson, president of the Women's Political Council, stayed up all night after Rosa Parks' arrest on December 1, 1955, mimeographing 35,000 boycott flyers in the basement of Councill Hall with fellow professor John Cannon and her students. The one-day boycott became the 381-day movement that broke bus segregation. Alumni of the era include Ralph Abernathy ('50), who organized the boycott alongside Dr. King, and Aurelia Browder, the plaintiff in Browder v. Gayle — and the class of 1951 alone produced F.D. Reese, Fred Shuttlesworth, and Fred Gray. After King's house was bombed, he and his family moved onto the ASU campus, and King used the library to finish his dissertation on Gandhi.
On February 25, 1960, about 29 ASU students sat in at the segregated lunch counter in the Montgomery County Courthouse basement. Governor John Patterson, who chaired the State Board of Education, threatened to cut the college's funding unless President H.C. Trenholm expelled the leaders; nine students were expelled and twenty put on probation. The expelled students sued, and Dixon v. Alabama (1961) established that public-college students have a constitutional right to due process — the foundation of modern student-conduct rights nationwide. President William Harris reinstated the nine in 2010; the state formally expunged their records in 2018.
The State Board of Education approved the change from Alabama State College to Alabama State University. The 'University' name was more than a rebrand — it marked the school's arrival as a graduate-degree institution, and it came in the same year as the Apollo moon landing and the school's last name change to date. It has been Alabama State University ever since.
ASU joined the Southwestern Athletic Conference in 1982, stepping up to NCAA Division I and FCS football. The move put the Hornets on the same stage as Grambling, Southern, and Jackson State — the programs that define HBCU football. Everything ASU has won since, from the 1991 national title to the 2004 SWAC crown, has come inside that conference.
WVAS-FM signed on June 15, 1984, broadcasting 25,000 watts from the fifth floor of the Levi Watkins Learning Center. It has since grown to 80,000 watts on 90.7 FM, with a listenership spanning 18 counties and more than 651,000 people, plus a global web stream. It is one of the flagship public-radio voices of the Black South — the sound of the university turned outward.
Under head coach Houston Markham, the Hornets went 11-0-1, won the SWAC, took the Heritage Bowl over North Carolina A&T, and were crowned Black College National Champions. Linebacker Eddie Robinson — later an 11-year NFL linebacker and Super Bowl XXXIV starter — was the defense's anchor and the Black College Sports Defensive Player of the Year. It remains the pinnacle season in program history, and the standard every Hornets team since has been measured against.
The remedial decree in the Knight v. Alabama desegregation case declared ASU a comprehensive regional institution. It brought two new undergraduate and four new graduate programs, diversity scholarship funding, endowment money, and funding for what became the John L. Buskey Health Sciences Center. Knight was the legal settlement of Alabama's higher-education segregation — and ASU, the school founded by former slaves, came out of it bigger.
Coach Charles Coe's Hornets beat Southern 40-35 in the SWAC Championship Game for the school's second SWAC football crown. The title capped the program's best sustained run in the conference era and remains its most recent football championship. Coe's team won it with offense — 40 points against a Southern defense that had bullied the SWAC for years.
The NCAA placed the university on five years' probation, banned the Hornets from 2009 postseason play, and stripped the football team's 2000 and 2001 records after an investigation of recruiting violations under head coach L.C. Cole in 2000–2001. It was the fourth NCAA penalty on the program since 1985. The sanctions gutted two seasons from the record book and forced a rebuild the program spent years climbing out of.
The 26,500-seat on-campus stadium opened on Thanksgiving Day, replacing the old Hornet Stadium and giving the program a modern home. The Turkey Day Classic against Tuskegee moved off Cramton Bowl and onto campus. A decade-plus of Thanksgiving crowds on University Drive North turned the stadium into the center of Black Montgomery's holiday.
Former Alabama state senator (2002–2017) and ASU alumnus Quinton T. Ross Jr. became the 15th president. His tenure has centered on fiscal repair: debt reduction, over $20 million in infrastructure upgrades, and $91 million in Wall Street financing for new student apartments. He also led the school to SACSCOC reaffirmation of accreditation through 2030 — the credential everything else stands on.
The Mighty Marching Hornets marched the Tournament of Roses Parade in Pasadena on New Year's Day 2019 — one of the most-watched stages any college band can play. Under Dr. James B. Oliver the band had grown to roughly triple its 2000 size and had played the Honda Battle of the Bands, the MTV Awards, and The Ellen DeGeneres Show. Four years later, ASU became the first HBCU ever to HOST the Honda Battle of the Bands.
ASU received a $24.7 million federal grant from the U.S. Department of Education to help Montgomery Public Schools students prepare for college — the largest single grant in the institution's history at the time. The money tied the university's future directly to the city's public schools, the same schools its education graduates have staffed for generations. It was a mission statement in dollar form: the teachers' college serving its city.
Guard Amarr Knox caught a full-court Hail Mary inbounds pass from Micah Simpson and laid it in with one second left to beat Saint Francis (PA) 70–68 in the NCAA First Four — the first NCAA Tournament win in program history. The Hornets, who had lost their four prior tournament games to Michigan State, Duke, Morehead State, and UTSA, earned a date with No. 1 overall seed Auburn. The same year, philanthropist MacKenzie Scott gave ASU $38 million unrestricted — the largest single gift in the school's history, topping the 2021 grant fourfold.
The annual showdown between Alabama's two largest Black universities, played at Birmingham's Legion Field — uninterrupted since 1945, and at Legion Field since 1940. The first meeting was in 1924, when ASU won 30–0; through 90 meetings Alabama A&M narrowly leads 44–43–3, with ASU's current four-game win streak (2022–present) closing the gap. It is the largest HBCU event in the nation — nearly 200,000 participants, about $25 million in economic impact, a legendary Battle of the Bands — and ASU owns the largest victory in series history, 56–0 in 1931, a margin echoed by the 56–13 rout in 2025 behind quarterback Andrew Body's five touchdowns.
The oldest football classic in Black college football, played on Thanksgiving Day in Montgomery since 1924 — though the schools first met in 1901 (Tuskegee won 37–0). Muhammad Ali attended the 1966 game, and families have built their Thanksgivings around it for a century. Playoff politics broke the tradition: Tuskegee withdrew in 2013 and ASU discontinued the classic in 2014, moving it to the Labor Day Classic (2017–2019); the Thanksgiving date returned, and a one-year extension keeps the 102nd meeting on the calendar for November 2026. All-time, Tuskegee leads the series 62–37–3.
🥁 The Mighty Marching Hornets · since unverified
The Mighty Marching Hornets are one of the most recognized bands in HBCU culture. In December 1967 they got their first invitation to play halftime at an NFL game, and they have been back many times since, most recently at the Superdome for Saints-Titans in September 2023. Their 2012 Magic City Classic halftime show passed 3 million views on YouTube; they appeared in Ang Lee's Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk (2016), marched the 2019 Rose Parade, and in 2023 ASU became the first HBCU ever to host the Honda Battle of the Bands. The dance lines carry their own fame: the Sensational Stingettes debuted in 1977 and danced in Robin Thicke's 'Give It 2 U' video and Beyoncé's HOMECOMING film, and the Honey-Beez, a danceline of only plus-size young women, debuted in 2004 and competed on America's Got Talent in 2017. The jazz roots run even deeper — Erskine Hawkins directed the Bama State Collegians in the 1930s before 'Tuxedo Junction' made him famous.
The earliest director confirmed by name; hired Danny B. Davis as his assistant band director.
Jacksonville, Florida native who marched at FAMU under William P. Foster; left ASU to direct Central State's band in 1977, came back to lead the Hornets in 1988. Died February 27, 2023, at 79.
Davis left in 1994 and James Oliver returned in 2000; names for the stretch between could not be confirmed from an opened source.
ASU alumnus who marched in the band, cut his teeth as Davis's assistant at Central State, then came home. Took the band from about 110 members to roughly triple that and put it on national stages: Honda Battle of the Bands, the MTV Awards, The Ellen DeGeneres Show, and the 2019 Tournament of Roses Parade. Governor Ivey proclaimed May 11 Mighty Marching Hornet Day; Montgomery named September 25, 2014 Dr. James Oliver Day. Retired December 2025.
Mobile native and ASU alumnus who was the trumpet section leader in the Mighty Marching Hornets; completing a doctorate in wind conducting at the University of Alabama with experience in the Million Dollar Band and the Jefferson and Mobile County school systems, where his bands earned consistent superior ratings. Named director in spring 2026.
The full Divine Nine holds chapters at ASU, as across the HBCU South. The Kappa Alpha Psi chapter Beta Zeta carries the distinction of being the first Kappa chapter chartered in Alabama.
Still digging this up — check back soon.
The 7,400-seat multi-purpose arena opened as the Joe L. Reed Acadome, named for the civil-rights leader and ASU figure Joe L. Reed. In May 2008 the board of trustees stripped Reed's name after a bitter fight over lawsuits and bad publicity and renamed it for the program's two winningest basketball coaches, Charles Johnson 'C.J.' Dunn (298 wins, 1934–1963) and James V. Oliver (291 wins from 1978). It hosted an NBA preseason game (Hawks vs. Clippers) in 1996 and has hosted Earth, Wind & Fire, Frankie Beverly and Maze, and Jill Scott.
Residence hall named for C.J. Dunn, the coach who won 298 games over three decades and later served as dean of students, athletic director, and SIAC commissioner.
Men's and women's tennis center named for ASU alumna Olean Black Underwood, who attended from 1968 to 1972 when the school fielded no women's athletic programs at all.
The 80,000-square-foot health sciences building — gross anatomy lab, therapeutic rehabilitation labs, the Laboratory for the Analysis of Human Motion, an interdisciplinary clinic, and health-science computer labs. It was the flagship construction the 1995 Knight v. Alabama decree funded.
New student residence hall named for Dr. Robert C. Hatch, the interim president who bridged the H.C. Trenholm and Levi Watkins eras.
The 39,000-square-foot dining hall named for civil rights leader Fred Shuttlesworth, an ASU alumnus.
A 60,000-square-foot teaching and research building that expanded the university's science footprint beyond the older lecture halls.
Large residence hall named for the Rev. Ralph David Abernathy, the civil-rights leader and class of 1950 alumnus who organized the Montgomery bus boycott beside Dr. King.
Dedicated football operations building that put the Hornets' locker rooms, meeting space, and training facilities under one roof — a year before the stadium opened.
The 26,500-seat on-campus football stadium opened on Thanksgiving Day 2012, giving the Hornets a real home field for the first time and anchoring game days in Montgomery.
The board approved two apartment-style complexes — 288 beds on Forest Avenue and 264 on South University Drive, with a student activity center and café. The South University site replaces the old Cynthia Alexander Apartments. First new construction on campus since 2011; targeted for 2026 occupancy, backed by $91 million in Wall Street financing.
A five-year facilities overhaul: new video boards for football, baseball, and softball; new basketball and volleyball competition floors; the Horace Crump track-and-field renovation; baseball and softball batting cages; locker-room and weight-room renovations; new turf at Hornet Stadium and the Houston Markham Complex; a new indoor golf facility; and the Courtney Stewart Creative Suite, the first multimedia center built solely for athletic content. The tenure also put one of the nation's first full-service campus YMCAs on a university campus.
Notable faculty include Dr. Derryn Moten, chairman of history and political science, who drafted the 2018 resolution that got the state to expunge the 1960 sit-in students' records. WVAS 90.7 FM, the university's 80,000-watt public radio station, has broadcast from campus since 1984.
15th president; former Alabama state senator (2002–2017) and Senate minority leader; ASU alumnus.
Listed as provost in university references; leads academic affairs.
ASU alumnus and former NFL linebacker (11 seasons, Super Bowl XXXIV starter); returned as head football coach.
ASU is a compact, 172-acre urban campus in Montgomery where about 40 percent of the nearly 6,000 students come from outside Alabama. Fall centers on two football traditions older than most of the fans: the Turkey Day Classic, played on or near Thanksgiving since 1924, and the Magic City Classic against Alabama A&M in Birmingham, one of the biggest HBCU gatherings in the country. The Mighty Marching Hornets, Stingettes, and Honey-Beez are as much the draw as the football. The campus also hosts the National Center for the Study of Civil Rights and African-American Culture, and its history is not decorative — the boycott was mimeographed in a dorm basement here.