Little Rock, Arkansas · Founded 1884 · Buffaloes
“The only historically Black Baptist college west of the Mississippi — built by freedmen to train Black ministers, still holding a single city block in Little Rock since 1885.”
The Stampede of Sound's first game footage — march-in, stand tunes ('400 Degrees,' 'Neck') and field-show highlights against UPIKE, the official start of the program's performing life.
THV11 (KTHV) local news report on the band's Homecoming 2026 debut and the first 'Battle of the Rock' at Lamar Porter Field.
THV11's companion report introducing 'The Stampede of Sound' — the first marching band in the college's 140-year history — to Little Rock.
Short clip from the September 2026 'Battle in the Rock,' the debut program's first battle of the bands with LeMoyne-Owen and Stillman in Little Rock.
Full-game video of the 2026 season opener at the University of Pikeville — the same game the Stampede of Sound marched for its first halftime show.
Sooner Athletic Conference football on the Nelson University Sports Network — the Buffaloes in league play during the 2026 season.
The Buffaloes at Nelson two seasons earlier — a window into the program's growth between 2024 and 2026 SAC play.
Louisiana Christian's Senior Day 2025 broadcast from Wildcat Stadium in Pineville — SAC football between two Baptist schools.
Buffaloes baseball — a look at one of ABC's ten NAIA varsity programs outside football.
Khatib discusses the Arkansas premiere of his documentary 'Because They Believed: Minority Athletic Trailblazers Who Broke Through the Racial Divide,' which screened at Arkansas Baptist College's historic Old Main auditorium.
From the Yard's video feed.
From the Yard's video feed.
The 'King of the Jukebox' — bandleader, songwriter, and actor who attended ABC in the late 1920s and majored in music; charted 50+ hits, recorded 'G.I. Jive' and 'Saturday Night Fish Fry,' was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987, and was named one of Rolling Stone's 100 Greatest Artists of All Time in 2004.
Football star — Auburn's offensive MVP of the 2011 BCS National Championship game; later attended Arkansas Baptist College.
Negro leagues baseball player who appeared in 364 games across eight seasons (1921–1929); Baseball-Reference records him as having attended Arkansas Baptist College.
Negro leagues outfielder who played 665 games over 12 seasons (1920–1931); Baseball-Reference records him as having attended Arkansas Baptist College.
Actor and entertainer who starred on Nickelodeon and in films; listed among the college's notable alumni.
Mental health advocate recognized nationally for barbershop-based mental health outreach; listed among the college's notable alumni.
Civil rights activist; listed among the college's notable alumni.
Prominent preacher and church leader; listed among the college's notable alumni.
Baptist pastor who spent 50 years pastoring six churches across Arkansas and Oklahoma, most notably Mount Calvary Baptist in Pine Bluff; the namesake of ABC's James & Rosa McKissic School of Christian Studies. Educated at Arkansas Baptist and Arkansas AM&N.
President of Baptist Health System Arkansas; named among the college's famous alumni in a statewide 'Famous folk who went to school righthere' survey.
Vice president for corporate communications at Black Entertainment Television Holdings Inc.; named among the college's famous alumni in the same statewide survey.
Class of 1973; national president of the Arkansas Baptist College alumni association, who publicly vouched for the Fitz Hill-era revitalization of the school.
In August 1884, at the annual convention of the Colored Baptists of the State of Arkansas, Black Baptists voted to found their own school. Three months later, in November 1884, the Minister's Institute opened at Mount Zion Baptist Church in Little Rock. The primary objective was blunt and practical: raise the educational level of the Black ministry, with a secondary mission of making higher education available to young Black men and women. Rev. Elias Camp Morris — minister at Centennial Baptist Church in Helena and president of the Arkansas Baptist State Convention — drove the founding; the convention's executive board hired Rev. J.P. Lawson, a white Baptist minister from Joplin, Missouri, as the first principal and teacher.
In April 1885 the school took the name Arkansas Baptist College (the Encyclopedia of Arkansas dates the name change to August 1885; both agree it was that year). The executive board bought a block of land at the southwest corner of 16th Street and High Street — now Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive — from Attorney Blake Turner for $5,000, and built wooden structures there. The campus has sat on that same ground ever since, formally addressed today at 1621 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, inside the Little Rock Central High District. Most of the early students trained for the ministry, and Religious Studies remains one of the college's major areas of study to this day.
Joseph Albert Booker, a formerly enslaved man who had become a newspaper editor, became the college's first president in 1887 and would hold the office until his death in 1926 — a 39-year tenure that defined the institution. Booker was an influential educator who actively fought segregationist policies in Little Rock, using both the college and his newspaper platform to push back. Under Booker the college secured its permanent home and began erecting the brick campus that replaced the early wooden buildings. He remains the towering figure of Arkansas Baptist's early history.
On March 2, 1893, fire burned down the wooden structures at 16th and High Street. The college refused to leave the site. On November 2, 1893, the cornerstone was laid for the Old Main building, a Second Empire-style brick building with a mansard roof and a bell tower that signaled class periods. It took several years to complete. Old Main housed the kitchen, dining hall, and home economics in the basement; the president's, registrar's, and business manager's offices plus the chapel on the upper floors, and the girls' dormitory on the second and third floors. It is the oldest building in Arkansas constructed for the purpose of educating Black students, and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1976.
By 1913 the campus had grown into a small, self-contained institution: a three-story boys' dormitory, a manual training building, and the president's home, alongside Old Main. The college was still a modest operation — decades away from four-year accreditation — but it was now a physical campus with dormitories, shops, and classrooms rather than a handful of wooden halls. The manual training building reflected the era's emphasis on vocational instruction alongside the ministry curriculum. The footprint established in this period survived into the modern campus.
Joseph Albert Booker died in 1926, ending the college's foundational era. The years 1926 to 1937 are recorded as a fragmented period of short and overlapping leadership — Rev. S.P. Nelson, Rev. R.C. Woods, and Rev. S.R. Tillinghast each appear in the college's records as president or acting head within that span. The overlapping dates suggest interim and transitional appointments rather than clean successions, a sign of the institutional strain common to small Black colleges of the Jim Crow era. The college held together but drifted, awaiting the stability of its next long-tenured president.
Dr. Tandy Washington Coggs became the college's fifth president in 1937 and would lead it for 18 years. During his tenure, in 1947, Arkansas Baptist received its initial two-year accreditation from the Arkansas State Department of Education — the institution's first formal academic standing. Coggs steered the school through the Depression's tail and the Second World War, a period when enrollment and finances were both fragile. By 1950 the campus included Old Main, an education building, the boys' dormitory, an administration building, a gymnasium, and two more classroom buildings — a real, if small, college campus.
From 1955 to 1982 the college cycled through a series of presidents and acting heads, including Oscar Allan Rogers, Charles E. Johnson, Howard Johnson, and P.L. Rowe in the 1955–1962 span, and James C. Oliver and R.C. Davis from 1962 to 1982. Like the 1926–1937 gap, the records show overlapping tenures — interim appointments filling gaps between permanent leaders. In 1965 the original bell tower was removed from Old Main, ending the era when a bell rang the class schedule. The institution persisted through the civil rights era without the dramatic national profile of its cross-town neighbor Philander Smith, quietly serving the Little Rock Black community.
After decades as a two-year institution, Arkansas Baptist College was accredited by the Higher Learning Commission (North Central Association) in 1987, during the presidency of William Thomas Keaton (1985–2001). Full four-year baccalaureate accreditation followed in 2006. The school's offerings grew to five bachelor's degrees — Criminal Justice, Human Services, Religious Studies, Business Administration, Public Administration — and three associate's degrees, designed around the needs of the Little Rock community it served. Religious studies continued to be a major area of matriculation, honoring the school's origins as a ministry training ground.
On February 1, 2006, Dr. Fitzgerald Hill — the former head football coach at San Jose State — became the 13th president of a college on the verge of bankruptcy, with enrollment under 200 and accreditation at risk. Hill's approach was entrepreneurial and evangelical at once: he launched an aggressive recruitment campaign, bought up boarded-up homes and vacant lots around the campus (37 properties total, including crack houses he demolished or rehabbed), turned around the corner car wash (Little Rock police filed 36 incident reports at it in 2006, zero in 2009), and opened school-run businesses. By 2011 enrollment had grown past 1,100 and the annual budget from $2 million to nearly $20 million — the most dramatic period of growth in the school's history.
Hill relaunched athletics by starting a football program from scratch in 2007, hiring coach Richard Wilson and playing as an NJCAA independent. The inaugural Buffaloes went 0-9 against Southwest Junior College Football Conference teams, playing two home games at War Memorial Stadium and practicing at a boys and girls club in southwest Little Rock. The 2008 squad improved to 4-5 before being forced to forfeit every game over an ineligible player. After one year the Buffaloes left the SWJCFC over its five out-of-state player limit — but football was back at Arkansas Baptist, and it stayed.
On May 12, 2007, Arkansas Baptist held its 123rd commencement and graduated the largest class in the institution's history — 47 graduates. The milestone came the same spring the college received its four-year accreditation from the Commission on Higher Learning and the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education. The campus was already mid-transformation, with renovation and construction underway around Old Main. For a school that had nearly collapsed a year earlier, the 2007 commencement was the first public proof that the Hill turnaround was real.
Between 2009 and 2013 the campus changed more than in the previous century. A $7.3 million men's residence hall housing nearly 200 students opened (partially funded by a $2.5 million gift from former Alltel CEO Scott Ford), followed by a second dorm; the cafeteria was expanded from 77 seats to 322; and the $1.4 million First Security Community Union rose on the corner of MLK Drive and 16th Street with a food court and Roots Java coffee shop, study areas, and student loft apartments. Around 2012 the college announced an $18 million expansion — a new education building, a 190-bed residence hall, more land purchases — financed by First Security Bank with federal New Markets Tax Credits ($19.7 million in credits; $34 million total project cost). The school had demolished or renovated 20 houses, bought 12 more homes and lots, and acquired three businesses in its surrounding blocks.
A documentary by Larry Foley about Arkansas Baptist's resurrection — "Growing Hope" — won a 2012 Mid-America Emmy Award in Specialty Programs, giving the college's turnaround story a national platform. In 2013 Hill published "Putting the Neighbor Back in the Hood," his own account of the college's resurrection. The two projects cemented the ABC story as one of the great small-college comebacks of the era: a school with 200 students and $2 million in budget, sitting in what Hill called 'the most dangerous part of Little Rock,' rebuilt into a 1,100-student campus that was buying up the blight around it.
In September 2014 the college enrolled 863 students — its modern peak. But in February 2014 the Higher Learning Commission had already put the school on notice that it was at risk of falling out of compliance with accreditation standards, and in 2015 the commission issued a formal Show-Cause order: prove the accreditation should not be withdrawn. The order was withdrawn in November 2016, but the fight drained the institution's energy and momentum. On April 29, 2015, the college dedicated the Scott Ford Center for Entrepreneurship and Community Development inside the Community Union, aimed at training entrepreneurs — including former prison inmates — to start businesses in underserved communities.
In July 2016 the board selected Dr. Joseph L. Jones — a Philander Smith graduate, social-justice scholar, and former executive director of the Social Justice Institute — as Hill's successor; he took office September 1, with Hill moving to lead the college foundation. The honeymoon was short. In December 2017 the board fired Jones, with the board saying he was terminated for cause and Jones saying he had resigned. He filed a wrongful-terminination lawsuit against the college (trial set for August 2020). The public leadership fight rattled an institution already weakened by the accreditation battle.
Howard O. Gibson, the college's chief academic officer since 2015, served as interim president from January to August 2018. In September 2018 the board tapped Regina H. Favors — former FBI employee and president and CEO of Pinnacle Business Solutions, a subsidiary of Arkansas Blue Cross Blue Shield, who had also taught as an adjunct at the college. Favors steadied the administration through 2020, when Dr. Carlos R. Clark was named president in August 2020; Clark departed in October 2021, and Favors returned as interim president through 2022.
In February 2019 the Higher Learning Commission placed Arkansas Baptist on probation for failing the accreditation criterion requiring adequate resources, with a re-evaluation scheduled for 2021. The college's solvency push included a three-year deferment on a $30 million bond issue through the U.S. Department of Education's HBCU Capital Financing Program, enrollment partnerships with New Life Church in Conway and Life Academy in Memphis, and a coding initiative with Apple Inc. and Tennessee State University to attract students. Fall 2019 enrollment was 515; the college had announced a goal of 800 for fall 2020 but reached only 432. Note: sources conflict on the probation's resolution — the Encyclopedia of Arkansas reports the college was removed from probation and fully accredited in 2022, while Wikipedia cites a 2022 placement on three-year probation. The full current standing could not be independently resolved; treated as unverified.
After the 2020–21 school year, the Buffaloes left the NJCAA's Bi-State Conference and joined the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics, competing primarily as an independent in the Continental Athletic Conference from 2021–22. The college now fields ten varsity sports: men's baseball, basketball, football, soccer, track and field, and wrestling; women's basketball, soccer, softball, and track and field. The move gave the school's programs — including the still-growing football team — a conference home at the four-year level for the first time.
In the fall of 2023, Buffaloes football joined the Sooner Athletic Conference as an associate member, putting Arkansas Baptist on a league schedule alongside HBCU peers Langston University and Texas College. The 2023 notebook had the Buffs at 1-6 overall and 1-5 in league play after an 83-0 loss to OUAZ, with Langston leading the all-time series 2-0 — a candid measure of how far the young program had to go. That same January, Dr. Calvin McFadden Sr. was named the 16th president; he stepped down after roughly a year.
Dr. Leslie Rodriguez-McClellon began serving as president in November 2024 — the former vice president of community relations at Saint Augustine's University and the first African American president of Rochester Community and Technical College in Minnesota. Fall 2024 enrollment had fallen to 326 students, and by January 2025 the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette was reporting that financial difficulties had kept the college from meeting payroll for months in a row, with senior posts unfilled and support staff positions eliminated.
On April 10, 2025, the board of trustees and the college's crisis management team asked Rodriguez-McClellon to resign after what the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education called 'extreme financial challenges'; former employee George Herts became acting president. That January the college had closed its Kiddie Kollege childcare center after 57 years in operation, and the federal government had received complaints about financial aid and labor issues. On the field, the Buffaloes notched a 20-19 win over Lyon College on September 13, 2025 — the kind of gritty road win the young program was built on.
During Homecoming week of September 20–26, 2026, Arkansas Baptist launched its first-ever marching band — the Stampede of Sound — under director Cedric Todd, a former Southern University assistant hired among that year's new class of HBCU band directors. On Friday night the band hosted 'Battle in the Rock' at Lamar Porter Field, welcoming LeMoyne-Owen College and Stillman College for the program's first battle of the bands. The same season the band marched its first game highlights against the University of Pikeville. It was a bright note in a hard year: acting president William 'Bill' Walker Jr. was placed on leave in August and his employment terminated on August 24, and the college leased a downtown hotel 1.4 miles from campus for student housing. As of October 2026, who holds the presidency could not be verified from public sources.
unverified: true — Arkansas Baptist and Philander Smith are the two HBCUs of Little Rock, blocks apart, and a natural cross-town rivalry exists in the minds of alumni and students. No verifiable public record of a named rivalry game, series history, or scheduled annual matchup was found in the sources checked; marked unverified rather than asserted.
Since Buffaloes football joined the Sooner Athletic Conference in fall 2023, the program's most meaningful gridiron relationships are with the SAC's fellow HBCUs. Langston led the all-time series 2-0 after a 45-8 win in 2023; Arkansas Baptist beat Langston 24-9 on September 26, 2026. Texas College — the SAC's other HBCU football associate — and Louisiana Christian (Senior Day 2025) round out the conference's Black-college cluster. These are developing series with real recent game history, not yet a named rivalry.
🥁 Stampede of Sound · since 2026
The Stampede of Sound is the first marching band in Arkansas Baptist College's 140-year history, launched during Homecoming week of September 2026. The college recruited musicians with scholarships (including full rides covering out-of-state fees) and fielded brass, woodwinds, percussion, color guard, and a dance line in its debut season. On September 25, 2026, the band hosted 'Battle in the Rock' at Lamar Porter Field, welcoming LeMoyne-Owen College and Stillman College for its first battle of the bands. The program is tied to new degree tracks — a BA in Music Performance and an AA in Music Business — and recruits under the creed 'Discipline + Focus + Action = SUCCESS.'
A former Southern University assistant band director (and Southern graduate) hired among the 2026 class of new HBCU band directors to build Arkansas Baptist's first-ever marching band program.
No Greek-letter organizations; no verifiable public record of fraternities, sororities, or chapter activity at Arkansas Baptist College was found in the school's catalog, news coverage, or any of the nine Divine Nine national chapter rosters. With enrollment under 400 at a church-affiliated junior college, organized Greek life is effectively absent.
Still digging this up — check back soon.
After the March 1893 fire destroyed the wooden campus, the college laid Old Main's cornerstone on November 2, 1893. The Second Empire-style brick building — mansard roof, gabled dormers, bell tower — is the oldest building in Arkansas constructed to educate Black students, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1976, and became a contributing property of the Central High School Neighborhood Historic District in 1996. Later rehabilitation (private donations, Arkansas Historic Preservation Program grants, National Park Service HBCU funds) reconstructed the mansard-roof cupola and restored deteriorated interior and exterior elements.
By 1913 the college had grown beyond Old Main into a real campus: a three-story boys' dormitory, a manual training building for vocational instruction, and a president's home. These were the institution's first purpose-built dormitories and shops, establishing the residential character the campus kept through the twentieth century.
In the 1930s the college added an education building that housed the library, classrooms, administrative offices, the Baptist Vanguard student newspaper print shop, the business department, and the biology room. The building concentrated the school's academic life in one place and gave the student newspaper a pressroom on campus. By 1950 the campus had further added an administration building, a gymnasium, and two more classroom buildings.
Under Fitz Hill the college opened a new men's residence facility housing nearly 200 students — more students than the entire enrollment when Hill arrived — partially funded by a $2.5 million gift from former Alltel CEO Scott Ford. A second dorm of comparable size followed, with the pair aimed at bringing boarding capacity to nearly 600. The dorms sat on ground that had been boarded-up homes and crack houses the college purchased and cleared.
As enrollment surged past 1,100, the college rebuilt its cafeteria in a roughly $2 million project, expanding seating from 77 (some accounts say 70) to 322. Hill joked that growth had outrun the infrastructure so fast that parking, not food, was becoming the real crisis — and the school began converting its acquired vacant lots into parking.
A $1.4 million, three-story Community Union went up on the corner of MLK Drive and 16th Street, on land where Yancey's restaurant had stood: a food court and Roots Java coffee shop (a brand the college developed with Scott Ford's Westrock Coffee) on the first floor, study areas on the second, and student loft apartments on the third. Yancey's was relocated to a renovated building at Wright Avenue and MLK, alongside a college produce stand. The Union later housed the Scott Ford Center for Entrepreneurship and Community Development.
Between 2006 and the early 2010s the college purchased 37 homes and vacant lots around the campus, demolished or renovated 20 houses, bought 12 additional homes and lots, and acquired three businesses — the Auto Baptism car wash, a fresh-market produce store, and a restaurant property. The car wash went from 36 police incident reports in 2006 to zero in 2009. Hill framed the strategy as presence over separation: 'We engage our community rather than try to separate our community.' The fall 2006 launch of the African American Leadership Institute put students to work developing leadership skills inside the same urban community.
The college announced an $18 million expansion: a new general education building, a new 190-bed residence hall, expansion of the cafeteria, a community union, and purchase of nearby real estate, financed by First Security Bank with federal New Markets Tax Credits. The tax-credit allocation was $19.7 million against a total project cost of about $34 million, projected to create 154 full-time jobs and 300 construction jobs. Enrollment had risen from under 200 in spring 2006 to nearly 750 at the announcement, with a stated goal of 1,200 by fall 2014.
Opened and dedicated April 29, 2015 inside the Community Union, the Scott Ford Center was built to train entrepreneurs — including former prison inmates — to start businesses in underserved communities. It was the institutional home of the workforce-and-entrepreneurship strategy Hill had preached since 2006: connect the college's traditional HBCU strengths to applied business skills and let students learn distribution, marketing, and management by running real enterprises.
As part of the 2019 solvency push, the college obtained a three-year deferment on a $30 million bond issue through the U.S. Department of Education's HBCU Capital Financing Program, aimed at upgraded facilities. The same year the school partnered with Apple Inc. and Tennessee State University on coding experiences to attract and retain students, and began work to reduce energy costs on campus.
In January 2025 the college closed its Kiddie Kollege childcare center after 57 years in operation — a casualty of the financial crisis that had also left payroll unmet for months and eliminated many support-staff positions. The closure removed a long-standing community fixture from the campus and was cited by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette as a marker of how deep the cuts had gone.
In August 2026 the college entered an agreement to lease a downtown hotel 1.4 miles from campus for student housing — a stopgap housing solution as the school worked through leadership turnover (acting president Bill Walker Jr. was terminated August 24) and continued financial strain.
unverified: true in part — athletic directors and the current cabinet could not be verified from public sources checked as of October 2026; the catalog-era cabinet (Calvin McFadden, Jerelyn Duncan, Gerald Shields, Howard Gibson, Olivia Henderson) predates the 2025–2026 leadership turnover. Coaches and ADs are not reliably listed on public pages.
Former Southern University assistant hired in 2026 to found the Stampede of Sound marching band program.
Hired by Fitz Hill to start the Buffaloes football program from nothing; went 0-9 in the inaugural SWJCFC season, then 4-5 in 2008 before the forfeit scandal.
Arkansas Baptist is a tiny school — about 326 students in fall 2024 — sitting on a single historic block in one of Little Rock's toughest neighborhoods, inside the Central High District. Campus life revolves around faith (the school remains Baptist-affiliated under the Consolidated Missionary Baptist State Convention), athletics, and community engagement: the African American Leadership Institute puts students to work in the surrounding blocks, and the entrepreneurship center has historically trained residents — including formerly incarcerated people — alongside students. Homecoming week is the cultural high point, now anchored by the debut of the Stampede of Sound. The 2025–2026 financial crisis — missed payrolls, the Kiddie Kollege closure, leadership churn — has strained daily life, but the campus keeps operating with a student body that is 91% Black.