Jacksonville, Florida · Founded 1866 · Tigers (Lady Tigers)
“Florida's first HBCU — a 160-year-old AME school on Jacksonville's Kings Road that burned down, got rebuilt, lost its football team for 34 years, nearly lost its accreditation, and came back as the fastest-climbing program in Black college football.”
The band's national coming-out: Triple Threat's field show at the 2013 Honda Battle of the Bands in the Georgia Dome — the second of the program's two Honda invites and still its signature credential.
The relaunch era on film: the Triple Threat's 2026 halftime tribute to Michael Jackson, shot by the band's own media team in the first season of the Graham-led rebuild.
The Purple Thunder Dance Squad — the plus-sized dance line that became a campus signature — performing with the band in 4K, the visual that won them 'Best Non-Traditional Dance Squad.'
Fifth-quarter culture: Triple Threat trading blows with Tennessee State's Aristocrat of Bands after the 2014 John Merritt Classic — the band proving it could stand toe-to-toe with an HBCU blue blood.
Full field show from the 2017 season — the Triple Threat at full strength in the late-2010s, the era that rebuilt the band to nearly 100 members.
A Jacksonville football moment: Edward Waters and Jacksonville University's marching bands joining forces for a mass-band halftime show in 2016 — town-and-gown on the same field.
The band on the road: Triple Threat at a 2018 Battle of the Bands showcase at Palm Beach Lakes High School, taking the program deep into South Florida recruiting territory.
The ultimate measuring stick: the Triple Threat's Zero Quarter set opposite Southern University's Human Jukebox in 2019 — small-school band, biggest possible stage.
The most famous finish in school history: the 35-yard walk-off field goal that beat 13th-ranked Virginia Union 41-38 in the inaugural Unity Classic, September 13, 2025, on ESPN+.
Band vs. band at the 2026 Unity Classic: the fifth quarter between Edward Waters and Florida Memorial after the Tigers' 42-28 win — the sounds both fan bases came for.
Edward Waters on the road in 2026: the Tigers visiting Miles College for the Prince Hall Americanism Football Classic — the SIAC footprint stretching into Alabama.
Short-form Triple Threat footage from the band's own era — the kind of clip that recruits actually find first.
Civil rights giant; founded the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first predominantly Black labor union, and was the chief architect of the 1963 March on Washington.
Negro Leagues baseball legend — first baseman and later manager of the Kansas City Monarchs — who became baseball's most beloved ambassador and was posthumously elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 2022.
First Black sheriff of Jacksonville and the university's 29th president (2011–2018); the on-campus football stadium now bears his name.
Former U.S. Representative from Florida's 5th district, serving 12 terms in Congress (1993–2017) and a longtime advocate for HBCUs and veterans.
Former Florida State Senator from Jacksonville and a trailblazing Black woman in Florida politics.
Former NFL running back who starred for the Atlanta Falcons and St. Louis Cardinals in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Professional wide receiver who played in the NFL and CFL after starring for the Tigers.
Jacksonville television personality, actor, and former Duval County Commissioner — one of the city's most recognizable media figures.
Jacksonville City Council representative and longtime Northside political figure.
Author, scholar, and professor whose books on Black psychology and education are widely cited in the field.
Former president of Edward Waters College and one of the founders of Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity — the school's deepest tie to Divine Nine history.
Former president of Edward Waters College (and of Kittrell College), lawyer, and civil rights leader in the Jim Crow South.
In 1865, fresh off the Civil War, the Reverend Charles H. Pearce — a presiding elder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church — was sent to Florida by Bishop Daniel Alexander Payne. Surveying the wreckage and promise of Reconstruction, Pearce saw that no provision whatsoever had been made for the public education of Florida's newly emancipated African Americans, and he decided to build one. Assisted by the Reverend William G. Steward, the first AME pastor in the state of Florida, Pearce began raising the funds to open a school.
In 1866 the school opened as the Brown Theological Institute, the name chosen by Rev. Steward, initially located in Live Oak, Florida. It was founded by African Americans, for African Americans — the first independent institution of higher learning in the state of Florida and the first HBCU in Florida, period. The original mission was practical and urgent: educate freedmen and their children, and train ministers for the AME Church.
In 1874 the young school renamed itself Brown University, but the name change couldn't fix the ledger. Money ran short, enrollment wobbled, and the school was forced to close for much of the 1870s — nearly a decade of darkness for Florida's first Black college. The doors stayed shut until 1883, when the AME Church revived the school under a new name: the East Florida Conference High School. It soon became the East Florida Scientific and Divinity High School under the direction of the Rev. William Preston Ross, who began rebuilding both the curriculum and the institution's footing.
Within a decade of reopening, the school's program had grown beyond a high school, and in 1892 the trustees gave it a new name and a new identity: Edward Waters College, in honor of Edward Waters, the third bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. The name would stick for 129 years. It was the moment the little AME school in Jacksonville stopped being a high school project and started becoming a college.
An 1893 drawing of the college shows its president at the time: John R. Scott, Sr., the first pastor of St. Paul African Methodist Episcopal Church of Jacksonville and a former member of the Florida Legislature. Scott embodied the school's DNA from the start — Black church leadership, Black political leadership, and education as the bridge between them. His tenure anchored the college through the 1890s as it settled into its Jacksonville identity.
On May 3, 1901, the Great Fire of Jacksonville — the largest metropolitan fire in the American South at the time — swept through the city and reduced Edward Waters College to ashes. The campus on East Beaver Street in the Black Bottom neighborhood was gone, along with most of Black Jacksonville's commercial heart. The college faced an existential question: rebuild or disappear.
The answer came in 1904, when the Board of Trustees purchased the school's present site on Kings Road — under an imperative from Bishop M. B. Salter that the school must be rebuilt, not abandoned. Construction began on the new campus, and by 1908 Edward Waters had risen on its new ground about a mile west of downtown Jacksonville. The surrounding neighborhoods of New Town, Durkeeville, and College Gardens grew up around the once-rural campus in the decades that followed, making the college the anchor of Black Jacksonville's west side.
In 1916 the college built what would become its crown jewel: Centennial Hall, designed by Richard Lewis Brown — Jacksonville's first known Black architect — in a handsome collegiate style. The building, which now houses the Obi-Scott-Umunna Collection of African Art and the university library (relocated there in 1979), was added to the National Register of Historic Places on May 4, 1976. It remains the oldest building on campus and the physical link between the rebuilt college and the 21st-century university.
The same year Centennial Hall went up, Edward Waters fielded a football team for the first time. The Tigers played through the first half of the 20th century as a small Black college program in the segregated South, where HBCU football was one of the few stages on which Black institutions could compete for public glory. That original run would last a little over fifty years before the program went dark in the late 1960s.
From 1930 to 1935, Edward Waters competed in the Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Conference — the historic Black college league it would leave for nearly nine decades before coming home. Those early SIAC years planted the rivalries with schools like Savannah State and Tuskegee that still shape the Tigers' schedule today.
Under President William B. Stewart, Edward Waters was accredited as a junior college in 1955 — a humbling step down that kept the doors open — and five years later the four-year curriculum was restored. It was a quiet but decisive rescue: the school chose survival and academic credibility over pride. The restored bachelor's programs set the stage for everything that followed.
On April 26, 1968, administrators suspended the football program amid fervent campus protests, and the Tigers left the gridiron for more than three decades. The shuttering reflected the turbulence of the late 1960s on Black campuses nationwide — and left Edward Waters, a school that would later define itself through football Saturdays, without a team for a generation.
Beginning in 1979, the Commission on Colleges of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools accredited Edward Waters as a four-year institution, and the college began awarding bachelor's degrees under that seal. After the junior-college interlude of the 1950s, full SACS accreditation as a four-year school was the credential that made Edward Waters a real degree-granting college in the eyes of the academic world.
Jimmy Jenkins took the presidency in 1997 and ran the college for eight years, credited with growing enrollment and raising academic standards at a school that had spent decades just trying to stay open. His tenure stabilized the institution financially and academically, creating the platform on which the 2000s revival — football, the band, championships — would be built. When he left in 2005, the college was healthier than it had been in a generation.
In 2001, after a 34-year absence, Tiger football roared back — and the marching band came back with it. The reborn program quickly found its footing: the Tigers were named 2004 SEAC Champions, the Lady Tigers basketball team won its second EIAC championship in 2005, and baseball, softball, and volleyball all took 2005 conference titles. The Triple Threat Marching Band returned too, performing at halftime for the Jacksonville Jaguars, while the plus-sized Purple Thunder Dance Squad was named Florida's 'Best Non-Traditional Dance Squad.' For a school that had been an afterthought, the early 2000s were a coming-out party.
In 2004, Edward Waters submitted its SACS reaccreditation documents — and a Florida Times-Union investigation discovered that sections of text and statistics had been plagiarized from a similar document belonging to Alabama A&M University. The Commission on Colleges voted to drop EWU from membership, effectively revoking accreditation; the school's appeal was denied in February 2005. The college sued, a federal judge granted an injunction ruling the school had been denied due process and appointed two mediators, and in June 2005 the two sides settled, letting the college stay accredited while re-filing its documentation. Accreditation was reaffirmed in 2006. The scandal cost the school its reputation for a season but ultimately proved it could fight for its life — and win.
During the accreditation fight, former Bethune-Cookman president Oswald P. Bronson stepped in as interim president while a search committee spent two years finding a permanent leader. Then in June 2007, Dr. Claudette H. Williams took the helm as the 28th president — and the first woman to lead the institution. She gave the college its operating philosophy, the 'Double E Principle: Excellence and Ethics,' and led it until February 2010, when she resigned to become a vice president at SACS itself — the same accrediting body the school had battled five years earlier.
In 2009 the Triple Threat Marching Band earned its first invitation to the Honda Battle of the Bands at the Georgia Dome in Atlanta — the Super Bowl of HBCU marching bands — with a second invite in 2013. For a band barely a decade old at a tiny private college, back-to-back Honda appearances were proof the program could stand on a national stage. The Georgia Dome performances remain the band's signature credential.
On February 12, 2011, Nat Glover — the former Sheriff of Jacksonville, the first Black sheriff in the city's history, and an Edward Waters alumnus — became the college's 29th president. His tenure bridged the school and the city like no other: the on-campus stadium project that defined the next decade was approved under his watch in July 2017 as part of an $8 million-plus development. Glover retired in May 2018, and the stadium that opened three years later would carry his name.
In July 2018, Dr. A. Zachary Faison, Jr. — a lawyer and former vice president at Virginia Union — took office as the 30th president, and the school's modern era began. Faison inherited a multimillion-dollar operating deficit and engineered a fiscal turnaround: successive year-end operating surpluses for the first time in over two decades, nearly $50 million in campus enhancements, and a growth strategy built explicitly on athletics as a brand engine. His motto for the school: 'Emerging Eminence.' The board rewarded him with a unanimous seven-year contract extension.
In 2019 Edward Waters accepted an invitation to join the SIAC — the historic HBCU conference it had left in 1935 — and began the multi-year process of moving from the NAIA to NCAA Division II. It was the boldest institutional bet in school history: leave the small-college NAIA world and compete at the NCAA level for the first time in the school's 155-year existence. The NCAA approved the bid in July 2021, and the Tigers began play as a Division II program that fall.
In February 2020 the university broke ground on its permanent on-campus football facility, ending decades of wandering between Jacksonville high school stadiums. The Nathaniel Glover Community Field & Stadium opened in 2021, and the first game inside it doubled as the first game of the Edward Waters University era: a 24-20 thriller over Florida Memorial, the Tigers' first win as an NCAA Division II program and their first season-opening win since 2012. New varsity programs followed — men's volleyball, women's soccer, women's golf — growing the athletic department from 8 to 16 sports.
In 2021 the trustees made it official: Edward Waters College became Edward Waters University, and the school launched its first graduate programs — an MBA, an MPA, a Master of Education in Policy & Advocacy, and an M.S. in Cybersecurity, all 100% online. University status wasn't just a name change; it was the credential the school needed to recruit nationally and to justify the 'Emerging Eminence' brand Faison was selling. Enrollment began climbing, and the school started billing itself as the fastest-growing HBCU in Florida.
In 2024, after a nearly 90-year hiatus, Edward Waters earned full NCAA Division II membership and officially rejoined the SIAC — completing the journey Faison had started in 2019. The Tigers wasted no time: in their first year of full NCAA eligibility, they won conference championships in softball, baseball, and volleyball. The same year, SACSCOC reaffirmed the university's accreditation with no recommendations — a flawless review that would have been unthinkable during the 2005 plagiarism scandal.
On September 13, 2025, Edward Waters hosted the inaugural Unity Classic — a new Jacksonville football classic built around HBCU excellence, faith, and community, with a college fair, Battle of the Bands, and tailgate festival attached. The game itself became an instant classic: the Tigers, led by interim head coach Brian Jenkins, stunned 13th-ranked Virginia Union 41-38 on a 35-yard walk-off field goal as time expired, broadcast nationally on ESPN+. The win put EWU at 3-0 atop the SIAC for the first time in school history. Jenkins had the interim tag removed weeks later and was named the permanent head coach.
In spring 2026 the university announced a sweeping reinvestment in the Triple Threat: new brass, woodwind and percussion instruments, 100 new uniforms, and a year-round, credit-bearing band program with concert and jazz ensembles to follow. The rollout hit a snag when director-designate Moses Evans ('04) withdrew in March — then the school went back to its roots, naming founding architect Marques D. Graham as Director of Bands in April 2026, timed to the band's 25th anniversary. On the field, the momentum continued: a 42-28 Unity Classic win over Florida Memorial snapped a three-game skid to the Lions, a prime-time HOPE Labor Day Classic date with Jackson State aired on HBCU GO, and a 55-30 home thrashing of Savannah State on September 19, 2026 kept the Tigers climbing the SIAC.
The oldest blood feud on the schedule: the two Tiger programs have been playing since 1930, and as of September 2023 Edward Waters held a 12-11-4 edge in the all-time series — though Savannah State had won five straight, including a 31-28 heartbreaker in Jacksonville in 2022 sealed when Tiger back Tyler King fumbled on SSU's 23 with a minute left. With both schools sharing the Tiger mascot, every meeting is billed as a true cat fight, and Savannah State is EWU's nearest SIAC rival at about 90 minutes up I-95. Edward Waters flipped the recent script with a 41-14 win in August 2025 and a 55-30 home demolition on September 19, 2026.
The all-Florida HBCU showdown, staged as the Big Cat Classic. The rivalry's modern signature game came in 2021, when Edward Waters beat Florida Memorial 24-20 in the first game inside its new on-campus stadium — the Tigers' first win as an NCAA Division II program. The Lions had the recent upper hand, winning 38-21 in 2023 and 31-21 in 2024, before Edward Waters snapped a three-game losing streak with a 42-28 Unity Classic win on August 29, 2026, exploding for 35 unanswered second-quarter points.
The church-school rivalry with a trophy on the line: Edward Waters and Allen — both AME-affiliated — meet in the AME Football Classic, traditionally EWU's homecoming game, playing for the Bishop's Trophy. Allen seized the trophy in 2023 with a 59-21 rout in Columbia, the Yellow Jackets' first win in the series since 1959, and the 2024 edition closed EWU's regular season on November 9 in Jacksonville. When two AME schools play for a bishop's trophy at homecoming, the stands are personal.
Not an old rivalry but an instant one: the Unity Classic debuted September 13, 2025, pairing Edward Waters with CIAA power Virginia Union in a Jacksonville weekend built around faith, education, and HBCU culture. The first edition delivered one of the most dramatic finishes in school history — a 35-yard walk-off field goal, 41-38 over the 13th-ranked Panthers, on ESPN+. One game in, it's already the biggest stage Edward Waters has ever played on.
🥁 Triple Threat Marching Band · since 2001
The Triple Threat is the heartbeat of Tiger football Saturdays in Jacksonville — a band built from scratch in 2001 alongside the reborn football program, and the first EWC ensemble to ever earn a national spotlight with invitations to the Honda Battle of the Bands in 2009 and 2013. The band has performed at halftime for the NFL's Jacksonville Jaguars, and its auxiliary line, the Purple Thunder Dance Squad — a plus-sized dance line named Florida's 'Best Non-Traditional Dance Squad' in 2005 — has been a signature part of the show for two decades. In 2026 the university poured real money back into the program: new brass, woodwind and percussion instruments, 100 new uniforms bearing an emboldened EWU mark, and a credit-bearing, year-round instructional model meant to make the band a recruitment engine, not just a halftime act.
Founding architect of the Triple Threat Marching Band during the Edward Waters College era, building it from its early stages into a visible, high-performing ensemble. Returned as Director of Bands in April 2026 — timed to the band's 25th anniversary — to lead the relaunch with new uniforms, new instrumentation, and a year-round credit-bearing academic model. B.S. in Music Education from South Carolina State; prior tenures at Savannah State, Wiley, and Allen Universities.
Led the band through the mid-2020s rebuild as it returned to a nearly 100-member ensemble, traveling the band to marquee road games including a trip to Southern University in Baton Rouge where the full band performed at Greater Allen Chapel AME Church.
Edward Waters alumnus named Director of the Triple Threat in early 2026 as part of President Faison's major band reinvestment, then withdrew from the position in March 2026 before the rebuild season; the university moved on and named Graham weeks later.
All nine Divine Nine organizations hold chapters at Edward Waters, though two currently sit out (Alpha Phi Alpha inactive; Phi Beta Sigma suspended until July 2028). As a small AME-affiliated HBCU, Edward Waters sits adjacent to Divine Nine culture; the school's most concrete Greek tie runs through its own history, since Leonard F. Morse — a former president of Edward Waters College — was one of the founders of Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity. Homecoming week, yard shows, probates, and step culture are visible on campus during Unity Classic and homecoming weekends, but Greek life plays a supporting role to the band, the choir, and athletics.
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The university broke ground in February 2020 and opened its first-ever permanent on-campus football home in 2021 — the Nathaniel Glover Community Field & Stadium, named for the former Jacksonville sheriff who served as the school's 29th president. For decades Tiger football had been homeless, playing at Jacksonville high schools like Jackson and Stanton and even across the state line in Georgia. The inaugural game inside the new stadium was an instant classic: a 24-20 comeback over Florida Memorial, the school's first win as an NCAA Division II institution.
Built as a one-stop hub for advising, tutoring, and writing support, the Learning Commons anchored the university's academic turnaround under President Faison — the physical expression of a campus that stopped treating student support as an afterthought and started marketing it as a reason to enroll.
A newly constructed student life building with state-of-the-art experiential learning space, part of the nearly $50 million in campus enhancements the board credits to the Faison-era fiscal turnaround.
The Adams-Jenkins Sports & Music Complex — where EWU announced its NCAA Division II membership in 2021 — was overhauled with new locker rooms, a new gym floor, new bleachers, and a high-definition video board, giving basketball and volleyball a legitimate Division II arena.
The university's largest residence hall was renovated as part of the campus-wide housing push, easing a crunch so severe the school carried a waiting list for dorm beds and the City of Jacksonville later approved planning funds for a 425-bed Living Learning Community conference center.
The science and mathematics building was modernized under the campus enhancement program, giving the biology, chemistry and math programs upgraded teaching space as the university launched new graduate degrees in fields like cybersecurity.
For the first time in its history, the 23-acre campus got defined fencing and a clear perimeter — a basic security measure the school had gone 150-plus years without, and one of the most quietly consequential upgrades of the Faison era for a campus sitting on the Kings Road corridor.
A new wellness and weight training facility was built to serve all 16 varsity programs — expanded weight room, medical treatment apparatus, and a nutrition center — alongside a dedicated student-athlete academic center, the kind of infrastructure EWU had never had as an NAIA school.
The stadium added a donor-facing luxury suite in 2023, part of President Faison's open strategy of using athletics to grow the brand, grow enrollment, and use that revenue to fund academic programs.
The 53-year-old dining hall, built in 1971 and largely untouched since, was gutted and rebuilt starting in 2022 and unveiled September 25, 2024, renamed for the late Bishop McKinley Young, a revered AME leader. The $3.7 million project added an expanded main dining area, a late-night campus grill, a faculty and presidential dining room, the Tiger Stripe Café, and — for the first time — elevator access and handicap restrooms.
NCAA-regulation tennis courts were completed, putting EWU's racquet facilities among the best-equipped of any small private Black college in the country.
Through a partnership with Follett Higher Education Group and Hewlett Packard, every new first-year student received a laptop from 2019 through 2025 — a tangible answer to the digital divide that helped the school market itself as Florida's 'Destination Institution of Emerging Eminence.'
Athletics is the growth engine by presidential design: Faison hired Toriano Morgan to lead football into the NCAA era in 2021, then Brian Jenkins — one of the most successful coaches in recent HBCU football — took the program to the top of the SIAC in 2025. Note: one D1-relevant notification for the owner — this profile involved no D1 writes (research only).
President & CEO, 30th president (July 2018–present); lawyer; architect of the NCAA DII move, university status, and ~$50M campus transformation; unanimous seven-year contract extension.
Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs; served as SACSCOC liaison during the flawless 2024 reaffirmation with no recommendations.
Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer; joined the senior team to run day-to-day operations behind Faison's growth plan.
Head football coach; elevated from interim in fall 2025 after a 3-0 start and the 41-38 Unity Classic walk-off win over #13 Virginia Union — the best start in school history.
Director of Bands (April 2026–present); founding architect of the Triple Threat, brought back for the band's 25th anniversary and the Faison-era reinvestment.
Edward Waters is small on purpose — about 1,200 students on 23 acres of the Kings Road corridor, a mile west of downtown Jacksonville, in the historically Black New Town neighborhood. That smallness is the selling point: everybody knows everybody, the president knows your name, and game day at the Nathaniel Glover stadium feels like a family reunion with a marching band. Fall runs on football rituals — the Unity Classic weekend (college fair, Battle of the Bands, tailgate festival), the Big Cat Classic against Florida Memorial, and homecoming's AME Football Classic for the Bishop's Trophy against Allen. The Triple Threat and the Purple Thunder Dance Squad are as central to campus identity as any team, the EWC Choir carries the school's gospel and concert tradition, and the 'Double E Principle: Excellence and Ethics' — coined under President Claudette Williams — still hangs over campus culture. Over 90% of students rely on financial aid, and the school markets itself hard as Florida's 'Destination Institution of Emerging Eminence,' the little HBCU that outgrew its NAIA shoes.