Orangeburg, South Carolina · Founded 1869 · Panthers
“The oldest HBCU in South Carolina, still living up to the charter that banned discrimination before the state did anything else.”
The marching band at the Capital One Battle of the Bands during CIAA Fan Fest, Baltimore Convention Center, February 24, 2023 — Claflin's biggest band stage since joining the CIAA.
Pep band bringing the noise at the CIAA Fanfest — the ensemble that covers Panther basketball season.
The band's homecoming halftime set — homecoming week is the biggest stage of the year on campus.
The brass ensemble under director Thurman Hollins, with guest performers Endre Rice, Michael McClain, and Charles Outen.
The Chamber Winds' first-ever concert, April 20, 2023 — a new ensemble finding its sound.
The Concert Choir performing Horace Boyer's 'We Are Climbing Jacob's Ladder' under Dr. Jason A. Dungee at the spring concert — the choir is the school's signature ensemble.
The Concert Choir performing Mendelssohn's 'He Watching Over Israel' under Dr. J.A. Dungee.
The choir performing Roland Carter's setting of 'Lift Every Voice and Sing' — the Black national anthem at the oldest HBCU in South Carolina.
The Concert Choir at Bushnell Congregational Church in Detroit, April 14, 2015 — the choir's ~100-performance-a-year touring life on display.
The Gospel Choir D.R.E.A.M. performing off campus — the choir that recorded a live concert at New Mount Zion Baptist Church during homecoming.
The 2018 homecoming parade rolling down Russell Street through Orangeburg — the full community show.
Students and orgs celebrating homecoming week with celebrity guests Da'Vinchi and Marc John Jeffries — Panther pride in full effect.
'60 — photographer who documented the South Carolina civil rights movement; founder of the Cecil Williams Civil Rights Museum; still shoots for the university decades later.
First African American appointed to the South Carolina Supreme Court since the Reconstruction era.
'65 — eighth president of Claflin; first African American to earn a doctorate in mathematics at Dartmouth.
'93/'02 — architect who designed Lee Library and Tingley Hall; became the first Black architect in the U.S. Treasury's Office of the Supervising Architect, planning federal buildings in Washington.
Taught at Claflin 1890–1897; the first certified African American architect, designed Fisk Hall and the T. Willard Lewis Chapel on campus.
'53 — civil rights activist and professor at Clark Atlanta University.
'56 — artist and educator; first African American to receive a Doctorate of Arts from the University of Georgia.
'93 — actor; The Walking Dead and The Hunger Games: Catching Fire.
'04 — gospel recording artist.
'70 — South Carolina House of Representatives, District 102.
'48 — first African-American bishop of the Tennessee Conference of the United Methodist Church.
'39 — first African-American bishop of the Iowa Conference of the United Methodist Church; namesake of the James S. Thomas Science Center.
'50 — chaired Claflin's art department 1952–1973; the Arthur Rose Museum is named for him.
Alonzo Webster, a Methodist minister from Vermont, came to South Carolina as a missionary to teach at the Baker Biblical Institute in Charleston, a training school for Black ministers. In 1869 he secured a charter from the state to found a college that would prepare freed slaves for full citizenship. That charter flat-out banned discrimination among faculty, staff, and students, making Claflin the first university in South Carolina open to all people regardless of race. Webster opened the school's doors on October 27, 1869, and served as its first president.
The school was named for two generations of Massachusetts Methodist churchmen: Boston philanthropist Lee Claflin and his son William Claflin, the governor of Massachusetts, who put up most of the money to buy the campus. The Claflin money bought what would become a 40-acre campus on Magnolia Street in Orangeburg. William Claflin signed Boston University's charter that same year, 1869, which is why Claflin and Boston University still call themselves sister schools and run a formal student exchange. That Northern Methodist money is the reason a freedmen's college could open in the South Carolina low country four years after the Civil War.
A year after opening, Claflin merged with the Baker Biblical Institute of Charleston, the school Webster had come south to teach at. Baker had been established by the South Carolina Mission Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1866 to train African American ministers. The merger pulled Claflin's theological roots directly into its campus and gave it a pipeline of ministerial students. That Methodist DNA has never left the place — Claflin is still affiliated with the United Methodist Church and a member of UNCF.
On March 12, 1872, the South Carolina General Assembly designated the South Carolina State Agricultural and Mechanical Institute as part of Claflin University. Claflin took over the campus of the former Orangeburg Female Academy, and the new land-grant-style agricultural institute operated under Claflin's roof. For 24 years the two institutions shared the Orangeburg campus, one private and Methodist, one public and state-run. The arrangement was an uneasy marriage of convenience between two schools with very different masters.
Dr. Edward Cooke left the presidency of Lawrence College in Wisconsin to become Claflin's second president in 1872, replacing the founding president Webster. Under Cooke the school kept building out its curriculum even as the South Carolina political climate turned hostile to Reconstruction-era institutions. His twelve years in the job set the pattern of Northern-trained presidents running a Southern Black college. Cooke's administration carried Claflin through the dangerous years when Reconstruction was collapsing around it.
In 1879 Claflin graduated its first college class, a milestone that proved the freedmen's college could produce real college graduates in a single decade. But Cooke's presidency also saw disaster: a fire destroyed the Fisk Building, described at the time as a proud monument designed by Robert Bates, recognized as the first certified Black architect in the United States. The loss stung, but the school rebuilt and kept expanding. The fire became part of the founding-generation lore about what it cost to build a Black college in the 1870s South.
The Reverend Dr. Lewis M. Dunton, a Syracuse University graduate who had been Claflin's vice president and development officer, became the third president in 1884. He would stay for 38 years, the longest presidency in school history, a run of stability almost unheard of in Black higher education. Dunton was known as a practical educator, more interested in usable training than lofty rhetoric. His long tenure carried Claflin from the 1880s all the way through World War I and into the 1920s.
In 1896 the South Carolina General Assembly passed an act of separation that severed the Agricultural and Mechanical Institute from Claflin and set it up as its own separate institution. That separated school became South Carolina State University, the public HBCU that still sits across town in Orangeburg today. After 24 years of sharing a campus, Claflin was once again purely itself: a private, Methodist, liberal-arts institution. The split created a crosstown dynamic that persists — two Black universities in one small South Carolina city, a block or two of Magnolia Street between them.
In the late 1890s Claflin began constructing the brick buildings that still define its campus, designed by Black architects the school itself had trained. Robert Charles Bates, who taught at Claflin from 1890 to 1897, designed campus buildings including Fisk Hall and the T. Willard Lewis Chapel. Alumnus William Wilson Cooke designed Lee Library in 1898 and Tingley Memorial Hall, the elegant Georgian Revival building that anchors the campus. Three of those buildings — Tingley Hall, the Arthur Rose Museum (formerly Lee Library), and Ministers' Hall — are now in the Council of Independent Colleges' Historic Campus Architecture Project. Claflin was also the first Black college to offer architectural drawing courses.
Dr. Joseph B. Randolph became president in 1922, leading Claflin through the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, and the first years of World War II. Running a private Black college through the Depression was a feat of constant financial improvisation, and Randolph kept the doors open for 22 years. His presidency ended in 1944. By then the school had survived the hardest economic stretch in its history without closing, which more than a few Black colleges did not manage.
Dr. John J. Seabrook took over in 1945 and led Claflin through the postwar decade, when returning veterans and the GI Bill were reshaping American higher education. His ten-year presidency bridged the war years and the dawn of the modern civil rights movement. He stepped down in 1955. That same year, the Montgomery bus boycott began — the world Claflin would navigate under its next president was about to change completely.
Claflin was accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, formal recognition that its liberal arts curriculum met national standards. For a small private Black college in the Deep South, regional accreditation was hard-won and commercially essential. It kept the school competitive for faculty, students, and philanthropic money. That accreditation has held ever since, underwriting everything Claflin has built in the modern era.
Dr. Hubert V. Manning became president in 1956 and stayed 28 years, leading Claflin through the entire civil rights era and into the Reagan years. Orangeburg was a civil-rights flashpoint, and Claflin students and alumni were in the middle of it — alumnus Cecil Williams '60 was photographing the movement across South Carolina. Running a Black college in South Carolina through the 1960s meant protecting students while keeping the institution standing. Manning's long, steady presidency ended in 1984, just as HBCU funding debates were heating up nationally.
In 1971, the property known as Dunwalton became the official residence of Claflin's presidents, replacing the old residence at what is now the James S. Thomas Science Center site. The old president's residence was torn down and the James S. Thomas Science Center went up — a swap that put science where the president used to live and put the president in a new home on campus. That 1971 science building is still described by the school as its premier science facility more than 50 years later. The decision shows how Claflin prioritized laboratories over tradition even then.
Dr. Oscar A. Rogers Jr. became president in 1984, leading Claflin through the late 1980s and early 1990s as HBCUs fought for visibility and federal support. His decade in office set up the transformation that followed. Rogers handed the school off in 1994. His administration is the bridge between the old Claflin College era and the modern university that came next.
Dr. Henry N. Tisdale, a Claflin alumnus from the class of 1965 and the first African American to earn a doctorate in mathematics at Dartmouth College, became the eighth president in 1994. He would lead the school for 25 years, the most consequential quarter-century in its history. Under Tisdale, Claflin completed a $100 million capital campaign — raising over $105 million during an economic downturn — and dramatically grew its endowment. He launched South Carolina's first undergraduate biotechnology program, built out the campus infrastructure, and got Claflin consistently ranked among the top ten HBCUs in the nation by U.S. News. In 2016 the HBCU Digest named Claflin its HBCU of the Year. At one point 52 percent of alumni were giving back, the best alumni giving rate of any HBCU in the country.
Claflin moved its athletics into the Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association for the 2018-19 academic year, leaving the Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Conference where it had competed since 2008. The Panthers compete in NCAA Division II across ten varsity sports — men's and women's basketball, baseball, softball, volleyball, cross country, track and field, and cheerleading. Claflin fields no football team; its basketball programs carry the athletic identity. The move into the CIAA put the Panthers back in a conference with the classic HBCU heavyweights.
Claflin turned 150 in 2019 and celebrated its sesquicentennial with a full homecoming week: the Whispers headlined the Presidential Scholarship Gala, the Health and Wellness Center was named for President Emeritus Henry N. Tisdale, and a new Hall of Fame class was inducted. That August, Dr. Dwaun J. Warmack became the ninth president, arriving after five years leading Harris-Stowe State University in Missouri. Warmack inherited an institution on a roll — top-ten HBCU rankings, record fundraising, and the best alumni giving rate in Black higher education. Since taking office he has won the NASPA President's Award and was named the Orangeburg Times and Democrat's 2024 Person of the Year.
In 2020, novelist and philanthropist MacKenzie Scott donated $20 million to Claflin — the largest single gift in the university's 150-year history. The gift landed as part of Scott's sweeping donations to HBCUs, and for a school of fewer than 2,000 students it was transformational money. It put Claflin's endowment north of $70 million. The donation was a national headline and a vote of confidence in Warmack's young presidency.
On March 25, 2022, Claflin broke ground on a new Student Center, announced to centralize student services in one building. The plans called for a campus bookstore, a university pantry, a hair care center, indoor and outdoor lounge areas, and an auditorium/movie theater on the first floor. For a school whose students had long been scattered across older buildings for basic services, it was a quality-of-life statement. The groundbreaking was livestreamed for alumni during the pandemic recovery years.
On March 20, 2026, Claflin broke ground on its Center for Biotechnology and Innovation, a two-story, nearly 32,000-square-foot STEM facility between Magnolia Street and Goff Avenue. Congressman James Clyburn helped secure a $17.4 million National Institute of Standards and Technology grant to build it. The building sits partly on the footprint of Dunwalton, the former presidential residence, and will house AI, biotech, and cybersecurity labs. Warmack said the old 1971 science center couldn't compete for top STEM students anymore — the new center is Claflin's bid to stay a STEM destination among HBCUs.
Claflin captured its first-ever CIAA Softball Championship, edging Winston-Salem State 7-6 in the title game, and advanced to the 2026 NCAA Division II Softball Tournament. For a program that had never won the conference, it was the athletic headline of the spring. The championship season gave the Panthers their first taste of national tournament play. It was the biggest team trophy in Claflin athletics in the CIAA era.
The two HBCUs in Orangeburg — private Claflin and public South Carolina State — share one small city and one street, and their matchups are billed as the Battle of the Burg. In the 2011 Garden City Basketball Classic, SC State hosted Claflin in women's basketball, the teams' first meeting since the 1996-97 season. The rivalry runs hot in volleyball: in September 2026, SC State swept Claflin 3-0 in front of 750 fans at Dukes Gymnasium for Round 1, then Claflin answered with a historic 3-1 win on its home court at Tullis Arena in front of 1,211 fans — the Panthers' own recap called it 'a statement on their home court' in front of a roaring crowd. When two schools sit this close together, every game is a neighborhood argument.
🥁 Claflin University Marching Band
Claflin's musical identity is really the concert choir — the school's own writeup puts it bluntly: 'Most schools have marching bands and football. We have the choir, which has been a major component of the school since the late 1800s.' The marching band performs at basketball games, homecoming, and CIAA events, including a CIAA Battle of the Bands appearance in Baltimore in February 2023. The Concert Choir, under director Dr. Jason A. Dungee, performs roughly 100 times a year as the school's official ambassadors, including a 2015 tour stop at Bushnell Congregational Church in Detroit. Complete marching-band director history could not be verified from published sources.
Conducts the Claflin University Brass Ensemble, whose 2023–2024 season performances are on record.
More than 50 student organizations operate on campus, including chapters of eight of the nine National Pan-Hellenic Council organizations (Iota Phi Theta is present as a colony). The Phi Beta Sigma chapter Omicron, chartered in 1923, was the first Black Greek-letter organization chartered in South Carolina. The Greek Step Show is a homecoming-week anchor at Tullis Arena, and the homecoming tailgate draws heavy Greek alumni turnout at the Panther Den.
Still digging this up — check back soon.
Designed by alumnus William Wilson Cooke, who went on to become the first Black architect in the U.S. Treasury's Office of the Supervising Architect. The building's unusual late-Victorian plan and classical brick detailing made it a standout; it now houses the Arthur Rose Museum, named for art department chair Arthur Rose Sr. It is part of the Council of Independent Colleges' Historic Campus Architecture Project.
Also designed by William Wilson Cooke, Tingley Hall is the elegant Georgian Revival anchor of campus, with fine proportions and ornate masonry detailing typical of the style. Along with Trustee Hall (ca. 1910), Wilson Hall (1913), and the 1913 Dining Hall, it gives Claflin what historians call a campus of outstanding architectural harmony.
Trustee Hall (circa 1910), Wilson Hall (1913), and the 1913 Dining Hall fill out the brick historic district alongside Tingley and Lee Library. All of it brick, all of it period, which is why historians single out Claflin as a campus of outstanding architectural harmony.
Built on the site of the old presidential residence, the James S. Thomas Science Center became Claflin's science home — and the school still calls it its premier science facility more than 50 years later. The same year, Dunwalton became the official presidential residence. The swap put science where the president used to live.
The JTK complex houses Tullis Arena, home court of the Panthers and Lady Panthers and the stage for the homecoming Greek Step Show, Presidential Scholarship Gala, and graduation events. It anchors the athletic end of Magnolia Street.
During the sesquicentennial homecoming, the school's Health and Wellness Center was named for President Emeritus Henry N. Tisdale, its eighth president. The Whispers headlined the gala that weekend. Naming the building for a sitting-era president signaled how complete the Tisdale transformation was felt to be.
March 25, 2022: groundbreaking on a new Student Center to centralize student services — campus bookstore, university pantry, hair care center, indoor and outdoor lounges, and an auditorium/movie theater on the first floor. A quality-of-life investment for a campus of under 2,000 students.
March 20, 2026: groundbreaking on a two-story, ~32,000-square-foot STEM facility between Magnolia Street and Goff Avenue, funded by a $17.4 million NIST grant secured with Congressman James Clyburn's support. It will house AI, biotech, and cybersecurity labs on the former Dunwalton presidential-residence footprint. Warmack: 'We cannot compete in the marketplace for the best STEM graduates with a 1971 facility.'
Dr. Jerome Fitch was appointed director of athletics in 2012 after running athletics at Alabama A&M and Savannah State; current AD could not be verified from an opened source, so it is not listed above.
Ninth president since August 2019; former president of Harris-Stowe State University.
Conducts the Concert Choir, the school's ~100-performance-a-year flagship ensemble.
Campus life runs through the choir and the gym, not a stadium — the Concert Choir does about 100 performances a year as the school's official ambassadors, and homecoming is built around basketball in Tullis Arena. The student-faculty ratio is 13:1, and students come from 24 states, 12 foreign countries, and 44 South Carolina counties. With fewer than 2,000 students on a 40-acre urban campus, everybody knows everybody — and the Orangeburg rivalry with South Carolina State across town keeps the competitive edge sharp year-round.