New Orleans, Louisiana · Founded 1930 · Bleu Devils
“The Avenue of the Oaks in Gentilly — a small New Orleans HBCU where the choir carries the music tradition, the Xavier basketball rivalry is the Super Bowl, and the campus came back from eight feet of Katrina water.”
Full documentary on Dillard's history — Creole identity and class tensions, white philanthropy's grip on Black education, and the Katrina fight for survival. (YouTube oEmbed returns 403 for embedding-disabled videos; existence confirmed via search index.)
Short-form cut of the Dillard history documentary — the school's story in under a minute.
The First Lady's full 2014 commencement speech — 'stay hungry for education' — delivered to 226 Dillard graduates; the most-watched video in the school's story.
Denzel Washington's 2015 Dillard commencement: 'Put God first. Fail big.' Ten minutes, three points, one of his most-quoted talks.
S. Carver Davenport conducts the Concert Choir and Orchestra in the annual Christmas concert at Lawless Memorial Chapel.
The Concert Choir performs Roland Carter's arrangement of 'Precious Lord, Take My Hand' on its 1999–2000 touring season.
Postgame after the January 2016 upset of 8th-ranked Talladega, 84–74, in the NAIA Game of the Week — the signature win of Dillard's breakthrough season.
Xavier edges Dillard 74–71 in a Crosstown Classic thriller on Bentravin Phillips' 27-point night — the rivalry at its best.
Game footage from a men's Crosstown Classic doubleheader at Xavier's Convocation Center (Xavier 66, Dillard 63), embedded in Crescent City Sports' rivalry recap. (oEmbed confirmed the video exists but returned no title; title is descriptive.)
Postgame interview after Xavier's 52–40 Crosstown Classic win over the Lady Bleu Devils — the rivalry from the other bench.
Postgame interview with Bleu Devils head coach Joseph Price after a Crosstown Classic clash with Xavier.
Word In Black's Katrina 20-years-later series: how Coppin State's Garey Hyatt — hired away from Dillard days before the storm — opened Coppin's doors to displaced Dillard students.
Original 1975–80 Saturday Night Live cast member — the show's first Black cast member — and a Dillard graduate who studied voice at Juilliard after leaving New Orleans.
Actress, playwright, and poet of stage, screen, and television; an Academy Award nominee.
Jazz pianist and educator, patriarch of the Marsalis family; taught generations of New Orleans musicians including his sons Branford and Wynton.
Dillard B.S. in music, 1953; arranged Sam Cooke's 'You Send Me,' founded AFO Records — the first Black musician-owned label in the South — and spent 15 years as Sonny & Cher's musical director.
Avant-garde jazz clarinetist who formed his first group with Harold Battiste and drummer Ed Blackwell while all three were Dillard students.
Poet and journalist of the Harlem Renaissance (a Straight University alumna, from Dillard's parent school).
President of Smith College and then Brown University — the first Black president of an Ivy League institution.
'Queen of Creole Cuisine'; chef and owner of Dooky Chase's Restaurant, the legendary New Orleans dining room.
Chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.
Played 13 NBA seasons with six teams and won the 1975 championship with the Golden State Warriors; ranks among the NBA's all-time shot-block leaders with 2,082 blocks.
With support from the American Missionary Association of the Congregational Church, philanthropist Seymour Straight helped found Straight University in New Orleans, one of the first Black universities in Louisiana. It was built to educate newly freed African Americans in the years right after the Civil War, when Louisiana had just been readmitted to the Union. The school would later be renamed Straight College. A Louisiana Senate resolution marking Dillard's 150th anniversary notes that in 2017 the Preservation Resource Center renovated the only surviving edifice of Straight University, built between 1866 and 1871, which had served as a boarding house and dining hall.
The Freedmen's Aid Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church founded Union Normal School in New Orleans the same era, a school for training Black teachers. Over the coming decades it grew into New Orleans University, adding a secondary school called Gilbert Academy. The two church-backed schools — one Congregational, one Methodist — would spend the next sixty years as separate institutions before their fates merged. Both kept their church relationships even after the merger, and Dillard remains affiliated with the United Church of Christ and the United Methodist Church today.
Straight College operated a law department from 1874 to 1886, one of the earliest efforts to train Black lawyers in the Deep South during Reconstruction. For twelve years it gave Black Louisianans a path into the legal profession at a moment when the state's politics were still briefly open to them. The department closed in 1886 as Redemption-era politics choked off Black institutional life across Louisiana. Its existence remains one of the least-known chapters of the parent schools' history.
New Orleans University opened a medical department in 1889 that included a school of pharmacy and a school of nursing, responding to the desperate need for Black medical care and medical education. The medical school was named Flint Medical College and the affiliated hospital the Sara Goodridge Hospital and Nurse Training School. The nursing program was the first baccalaureate nursing program in the state of Louisiana. The medical college itself was discontinued in 1911, but the hospital and nursing school carried on under the name Flint-Goodridge Hospital.
On June 6, 1930, Straight College and New Orleans University merged to form Dillard University, chartered by the state of Louisiana. The Great Depression, the weight of Jim Crow, and a shared desire to be closer to the city's Black population pushed the two struggling schools together. The new university was named for James Hardy Dillard, a distinguished academician and advocate for Black education in the South. The trustees called for a coeducational, interracial school serving a predominantly African American student body under Christian principles.
Dillard's founders chose a new campus site in the Gentilly area, between what one account called a former cow pasture and a graveyard, and immediately ran into neighborhood opposition. The future home of Dillard was approved by the New Orleans city council on December 16, 1930, only after negotiations and pressure from the New Orleans trustees. Prominent white allies including Warren Kearny lobbied the mayor's office on the university's behalf. Architect Moise Goldstein was commissioned to design the new campus in a stately classical revival style — the gleaming white buildings under the oaks that still define Dillard's look.
The cornerstone for the new Gentilly campus was laid on May 27, 1934, on Gentilly Boulevard. Across town, the cornerstone for a new Flint-Goodridge Hospital had been laid less than a year earlier, since the trustees had elected to continue the hospital's work. The university operated Flint-Goodridge Hospital of Dillard University from 1932 until 1983. Building a brand-new Black university campus from scratch in Depression-era New Orleans was itself a statement of intent.
Dillard University opened for enrollment on September 24, 1935, on its new Gentilly campus. The opening faculty was a remarkable group: Horace Mann Bond in psychology and education, Lawrence D. Reddick in history, and St. Clair Drake in sociology and anthropology, among others. The National Park Service's historic nomination for the campus notes that both the Booker T. Washington vocational philosophy and the W. E. B. Du Bois liberal-arts 'talented tenth' position were brought to the table in fashioning Dillard, with the American Missionary Association's liberal-arts commitment winning out. The campus's white classical buildings and shaded oak paths were designed to announce that a serious institution had arrived.
The Dillard University Concert Choir gave its first performance on December 8, 1935, just months after the university opened. Initiated under Professor Frederick Hall, the choir's inaugural 1935–36 tour set a high standard, playing Southern cities and notable events and establishing a reputation for excellence that never left. Hall once remarked that the vocal talent among Dillard students was 'above average.' The choir — not a marching band, since Dillard never fielded a football team — became the university's signature musical institution.
After protracted debate over whether a white faculty would answer to a Black president, the trustees chose a white man, Will W. Alexander — head of the Commission on Interracial Cooperation — as acting president for 1935–36. Alexander had no desire to be a college president and left after a year to head the federal Resettlement Administration. In April 1937, Dr. William Stuart Nelson was inaugurated as Dillard's first Black president. Nelson held an A.B. from Howard, a divinity degree from Yale, and had studied at the Sorbonne and the University of Berlin before serving on Howard's faculty. He left Dillard in 1940.
Albert W. Dent took office in 1941 and stayed 28 years, until 1969 — the longest presidency in Dillard's history, and the one whose name became synonymous with the university. Dent Hall, the campus gymnasium still called 'the Battlefield,' is named for him. His tenure carried Dillard through World War II, the postwar enrollment boom, and the first decade of the civil rights movement. When he stepped down in 1969, the school he left was firmly established as one of the South's leading Black liberal arts institutions.
On January 17, 1948, the Dillard and Xavier University of Louisiana men's basketball teams met for the first time, starting what became the fiercest crosstown rivalry in Black college basketball. The two New Orleans HBCUs — Dillard in Gentilly, Xavier uptown — would go on to play more than 140 times. The women's series began in the 1977–78 season. Three players from the men's series reached the NBA: Xavier's Donald 'Slick' Watts and Bruce Seals, and Dillard's George Johnson. The Allstate Sugar Bowl later sponsored the annual doubleheader as the Bleu Devil Classic and Crosstown Classic.
Dr. Samuel DuBois Cook became president in 1974 and led Dillard for 23 years, until 1997. Cook had been the first Black professor to teach at a predominantly white institution in the South (Duke, where he chaired political science), and Martin Luther King Jr. called him his political advisor. He turned down several presidencies before a campus tour changed his mind — he said a flashback to his mentor Benjamin Mays at Morehouse convinced him that if he could do 'one-twenty-fifth' with Dillard students what Mays did with his, his life would have meaning. The Samuel DuBois Cook Fine Arts and Communication Center now bears his name.
S. Carver Davenport, a Hampton Institute graduate trained under the great choral composer Roland Carter, became director of the Dillard Concert Choir in 1975. He would hold the post for half a century, becoming the longest-serving choral director at any of the nation's 107 HBCUs. Under Davenport the choir sang for President Gerald Ford and later at the White House for President Barack Obama, and Davenport himself was named music director of the 1990 Super Bowl halftime show. He insisted from day one: this is not a gospel choir, but a concert choir singing spirituals, classical music, and hymns. In 2025 the New Orleans City Council named the intersection of Gentilly Boulevard and Allen Street near campus the Dr. S.C. Davenport Honorary Intersection.
Flint-Goodridge Hospital of Dillard University, which the trustees had kept running since the 1930 merger, closed in 1983 after more than half a century of serving Black New Orleans. The hospital had been the heir of the Sara Goodridge Hospital and Nurse Training School founded in 1889. Its closing ended Dillard's direct role in hospital care, though the university's nursing program — the first accredited nursing program in Louisiana — carried the health-sciences legacy forward. The hospital's 1932 graduating nurses, photographed in front of the building, remain one of the iconic images of Dillard's early decades.
Musician Ray Charles established the Ray Charles African-American Material Culture Program at Dillard in 2003 to help preserve the culinary traditions and culture of New Orleans and the South. The program, overseen after Charles's death through the work of the Ray Charles Foundation, gave Dillard a distinctive humanities niche rooted in Black Southern foodways and folk culture. It reflected the kind of institution Dillard had become: small, culturally rooted, and serious about Black intellectual life beyond the classroom.
When the London Avenue Canal levee broke, the Dillard campus — sitting near the breach in Gentilly — went under six to ten feet of water. Every building flooded except Lawless Memorial Chapel; three residence halls burned, others had to be demolished, and total damage estimates ran to $400 million against a pre-storm endowment of just $45 million. Marvalene Hughes had taken office as president only months before the storm, and evacuating students was among her first duties. Dillard students scattered to host campuses across the country — including Coppin State in Baltimore, whose arts chair Garey Hyatt, hired away from Dillard days before the storm, opened Coppin's doors to them. With help from Senator Mary Landrieu, Hughes secured a $160 million low-interest federal loan to rebuild.
The physical comeback arrived in two landmark buildings: the $15 million, 55,000-square-foot Student Union, Health and Wellness Building, which opened in May 2010, and the $38.5 million, 130,000-square-foot Professional Schools and Sciences Building, LEED Gold registered, which opened in May 2011. Together they announced that Dillard was not merely surviving but building for the next century. Enrollment, which had cratered from about 2,200 before the storm to roughly 850 in 2008–09, began to stabilize. The campus that reopened was greener, tougher, and — with the new science building — aimed squarely at Dillard's historic strengths in the sciences and nursing.
Dr. Walter M. Kimbrough became president in 2012, bringing a national profile — he was one of the most prolific college presidents on social media, dubbing himself the 'Hip Hop Prez.' Over a decade he grew Dillard's endowment 115 percent to about $105 million and, crucially, got the federal government to forgive the roughly $160 million Katrina rebuilding loan. Under Kimbrough, Dillard leaned into its identity as a small, elite-feeling HBCU in America's most culturally potent city. He stepped down in 2022 after ten years.
First Lady Michelle Obama delivered Dillard's 2014 commencement address on May 10, standing before 226 graduates and telling them to 'stay hungry for education.' She wove Dillard's history — the sacrifices behind Black education in Louisiana — through a speech about structural inequality and obligation to the next generation. Class president Nicole Tinson took a selfie with Obama on stage, which the First Lady called her first commencement selfie. The address put Dillard on national television and remains the most-watched video in the university's story.
A year after the First Lady, Oscar winner Denzel Washington gave Dillard's 2015 commencement address — a ten-minute talk built on three points: put God first, fail big, and remember that you will never see a U-Haul behind a hearse. 'I've kept God in my life and it's kept me humble,' he told the graduates. Two straight years of A-list commencement speakers told the world exactly where Dillard saw itself. The speech circulates widely as one of Washington's most-quoted public talks.
The 2015–16 men's basketball season was Dillard's coming-out party on the hardwood. In January the Bleu Devils knocked off 8th-ranked Talladega 84–74 in the NAIA Division I Game of the Week at Dent Hall, behind 28 points and 10 rebounds from Demetric Austin. In February, before a sold-out 'Battlefield,' Dillard beat archrival Xavier in overtime at the Bleu Devil Classic — Jesse Ward's late three and game-sealing steal delivering the program's first home win over the Gold Rush since 2001. A team that had won five games the year before closed 18–10 as the most improved team in the NAIA.
Dillard celebrated its sesquicentennial in 2019, tracing its roots to the 1869 founding of its parent schools. The anniversary gala and commencement marked how far the institution had come from the floodwaters: enrollment had stabilized around 1,300, the campus was rebuilt, and the finances were steady. City Councilman Jared Brossett told school officials the university had advanced 'a proud tradition of excellence' across 150 years. President Kimbrough noted that after Katrina, Dillard had been 'the economic engine that got Gentilly restarted' — the first institution to come back in a big way and pull the neighborhood with it.
Dr. Rochelle L. Ford, dean of Elon University's School of Communications, was named Dillard's eighth president and took office July 1, 2022, succeeding Kimbrough. The second woman to lead Dillard, Ford was known nationally as an expert on diversity in public relations and a PRWeek Hall of Fame inductee. She framed her vision around Dillard as a 'communiversity' advancing health, safety, and innovation in Gentilly. She was formally invested in January 2023 at Lawless Memorial Chapel.
Dillard welcomed its first cohort of master's nursing graduate students in 2023 — the university's first graduate degree program in its history. For a school whose nursing lineage ran back to the 1889 Sara Goodridge nurse training school and the first baccalaureate nursing program in Louisiana, the master's was a homecoming. The program anchored Dillard's push into graduate health education under Ford's 'communiversity' plan.
After Dr. Ford stepped down on July 1, 2024 to focus on health and family, provost Dr. Monique Guillory served as interim president for seven months before being named Dillard's ninth president in January 2025. Guillory brought three decades of higher-education leadership, including roles at Morehouse School of Medicine, Xavier University of Louisiana, and the University of the District of Columbia. She holds a bachelor's from Tulane and a Ph.D. in comparative literature from NYU. Her tenure opened with the 'Transformation 2030' plan to restore the campus's historic buildings and the 50th-anniversary celebration of S. Carver Davenport's choir.
The defining rivalry in Dillard athletics: two New Orleans HBCUs, five miles apart, meeting on the hardwood since January 17, 1948. The Allstate Sugar Bowl sponsored the annual doubleheader for years, splitting it into the Bleu Devil Classic at Dillard's Dent Hall and the Crosstown Classic at Xavier. Xavier leads the all-time men's series, but Dillard has authored classics — none bigger than the February 2016 overtime thriller, when Jesse Ward's late three and steal gave the Bleu Devils their first home win over the Gold Rush since 2001 before a sold-out 'Battlefield.' Three players from the series reached the NBA: Dillard's George Johnson and Xavier's Slick Watts and Bruce Seals.
A Gulf Coast Athletic Conference rivalry defined by one famous night: in January 2016, Dillard beat 8th-ranked Talladega 84–74 in the NAIA Division I Game of the Week at Dent Hall, snapping the Tornadoes' 11-game win streak behind Demetric Austin's 28 points and 10 rebounds. The win put Dillard alone in first place in the GCAC and announced the Bleu Devils' breakthrough season.
Dillard has never fielded a football team, so there is no marching band — and that is the honest shape of it. The university's signature ensemble is instead the Dillard University Concert Choir, founded in 1935 under Frederick Hall and directed since 1975 by S. Carver Davenport, the longest-serving choral director at any HBCU. The choir has sung for Presidents Gerald Ford and Barack Obama, and Davenport was music director of the 1990 Super Bowl halftime show. Dillard's music royalty also runs through its alumni: Harold Battiste, Alvin Batiste, and Ellis Marsalis Jr. all came up through the university.
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Greek life at Dillard runs through the Divine Nine — all nine orgs hold chapters — and the NPHC presence is woven into the biggest week of the year: the Pan-Hellenic Probate Show, the Greek step show in Dent Hall, is a listed anchor event of every Homecoming Week.
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The $15 million, 55,000-square-foot Student Union opened in May 2010 — one of the two anchor buildings of the post-Katrina rebuild. It gave a campus that had lost nearly everything a new student-life heart: dining, gathering space, and wellness facilities under one roof.
The $38.5 million, 130,000-square-foot Professional Schools and Sciences Building opened in May 2011, LEED Gold registered. It houses the nursing program — heir to the first baccalaureate nursing program in Louisiana — along with the professional schools, and it doubled as the campus's storm shelter during Hurricane Ida in 2021.
The fine arts and communications complex named for president Samuel DuBois Cook, home to Cook Theatre and the university's arts programs. It was described as the 'new' Cook Center in the late 2000s as the campus rebuilt around it.
The largest campus project in Dillard's history: a $160 million low-interest federal loan, secured with Senator Mary Landrieu's help, funded the restoration of a campus that had sat under six to ten feet of water. Three burned residence halls were lost, damaged buildings were gutted and rebuilt, and the classical white-brick 1930s architecture was restored rather than replaced. Federal forgiveness of the loan, won under Kimbrough, closed the books on the disaster.
The historic chapel at the spiritual center of campus — and, remarkably, the one building Katrina's floodwaters never touched. It hosts Founders' Day convocations, presidential investitures, and the choir's Christmas concerts, and it has been maintained and restored as the campus's most protected landmark.
The campus gymnasium named for president Albert Dent, known to Bleu Devil fans as 'the Battlefield.' It hosts the Bleu Devil Classic rivalry doubleheader against Xavier, homecoming basketball, the Pan-Hellenic Probate Show, and the Coronation Ball — the hardest-working building on campus.
One of the historic Gentilly-campus halls, named for the Kearny family whose lobbying helped win the campus site in 1930. Its west wing hosts the National Alumni Association luncheon during homecoming week, keeping it at the center of alumni life.
Under presidents Ford and Guillory, Dillard committed millions to restoring its historic university buildings as part of the 'Transformation 2030' strategic plan — a deliberate turn from post-Katrina new construction back to preserving the 1930s classical-revival campus.
Dillard's early faculty was stacked with future giants: psychologist Horace Mann Bond, historian Lawrence D. Reddick, and sociologist St. Clair Drake all taught on the Gentilly campus in its first years. That tradition — serious Black scholars choosing a small New Orleans college — runs straight through to Davenport's fifty years with the choir and Clark's thirty-five on the faculty.
Ninth president; former provost; Tulane bachelor's, NYU Ph.D. in comparative literature.
Serving as interim provost under President Guillory.
Board chair through the Ford-to-Guillory transition; praised Ford's 'communiversity' repositioning of the university.
Directing the choir since 1975 — 50 years, the longest tenure of any choral director at an HBCU; honored in 2025 with an honorary street intersection at Gentilly Blvd and Allen St.
Leads the Bleu Devils men's program in the Crosstown Classic rivalry era.
Thirty-five years on the Dillard faculty; a steady institutional voice through multiple presidencies.
Dillard is small — around 1,300 students — and it feels it: the oaks, the white buildings, and Gentilly Boulevard make a self-contained world where everybody knows the choir director and the basketball rivalry is personal. Homecoming is the year’s gravitational center, built around parade, probate show, coronation, and the Xavier doubleheader rather than football. Students describe a tight-knit, tradition-heavy campus where the choir concert and the chapel convocation matter as much as any game.