Hawkins, Texas · Founded 1912 · Bulldogs
“A tiny East Texas HBCU on a thousand pine-covered acres, founded by former slave owners who deeded their land for Black education — and still running on faith, marching band, and Founders Homecoming.”
The NAIA's own Black History Month spotlight on Jarvis: Fulbright HBCU Institutional Leader honors, 'educational gem of Texas' status, and the new $40,000 esports lab.
iBuild America Podcast long-form interview with 13th president Dr. Glenell M. Lee-Pruitt on modernizing the school — enrollment growth, adult learners, and graduate programs.
Independent HBCU college-tour video walking through degrees offered, notable alumni, and key facts — the best single video introduction to the school.
A pre-university-status walkthrough of the Hawkins campus — the pine woods, the brick buildings, and the small-school feel, filmed before the 2022 rename.
Full-game footage of the East Texas rivalry: the Bulldogs against the Texas College Steers in RRAC conference play.
Season highlight reel for Bulldog guard Mark Wise, who averaged 10.7 points per game for JCU in the 2025-26 season — the current face of the program.
Full doubleheader footage of Lady Bulldogs softball against the University of the Southwest — rare video of a non-basketball JCU sport.
Commencement footage under the new university name — the diplomas read 'Jarvis Christian University' for the first time in school history starting with the class of 2022.
The 2021 honors convocation, filmed in the final year before the college-to-university transition — academic Jarvis at its most formal.
A 2011 National Alumni Association project: longtime Jarvis figure Dr. Ronald Hay (namesake of the student services center) in conversation with students — a window into the school's oral history.
Alumna (born 1941) — the first Black deaf woman to earn a doctorate. A landmark figure in both disability and Black academic history.
Jazz and R&B saxophonist (1933-2009) best known for his years with Ray Charles. Attended Jarvis on a music and theology scholarship and left after three years to play professionally with Buster Smith, T-Bone Walker, Lowell Fulson, and Lloyd Glenn.
Alumnus — Atlanta pastor and author; announced a 2026 candidacy for governor of Georgia.
Indianapolis Star journalist who enrolled as a Jarvis MBA candidate in 2024 — the great-granddaughter of co-founder Thomas Buchanan Frost, carrying a four-generation family legacy at the school. Her family established the Frost-Briggs Legacy Fund for Jarvis undergraduates.
Alumnus; senior pastor of College Hill Missionary Baptist Church in Tyler since 2015, and a frequent public voice for the university's church legacy.
Alumnus and comedian; hosted the revived 2025 homecoming step show, billed by the university as bringing 'trademark humor, charisma, and Bulldog pride.'
Alumnus; spun the soundtrack for the 2025 homecoming step show's return.
Class of 2019 (social work); 2018-2019 Mr. Jarvis, SGA officer, S3 percussionist, Phi Beta Sigma member — now the university's Assistant Director of Alumni Relations.
Alumnus who returned as the eighth president of the college (1980-1988) and secured the school's outright ownership of its founding land.
Not an alumnus but the co-founder: first superintendent from 1912, the man who cleared the land with the first students. His image hangs in the library and in the chapel's stained glass; the natural history collection sits in Frost Hall.
Head football coach 1924-1926 (not an alumnus) — went on to coach Black college football in Texas and Louisiana from 1924 to 1961 and was inducted into at least eight halls of fame.
American concert soprano, musical theater director, and playwright (1904-1991) who served as associate professor of voice and chair of the humanities department.
Historian (1890-1981) — the first Black graduate of the University of Oregon and author of 'Blacks in the West' — who chaired the history and social sciences department from 1960 to 1970.
One of the first Black women in Texas to hold a doctorate (1889-1988), an education reformer who taught at Jarvis from 1958 to 1965 and chaired the social sciences and teacher education divisions.
The Black Disciples of Christ of Texas start planning a school for Black youth, a full decade before any doors open. In Jim Crow East Texas, there is almost nowhere for Black families to get schooling beyond the basics. The dream is a school that would educate what the founders would later call 'head, heart, and hand.' It takes eight more years of organizing and fundraising before the idea has land to stand on.
Major James Jones Jarvis, a former Confederate officer whose family had owned slaves, and his wife Ida Van Zandt Jarvis deed 456 acres near Hawkins, Texas, to the Christian Women's Board of Missions. The condition is written into the deed: the land must be kept up and maintained as a school for the elevation and education of the Negro race, with efficient religious and industrial training. Mrs. Jarvis had to persuade her husband to give the land. It is one of the starkest origin stories in Black higher education: a slave-owning family funding the school that would educate the descendants of the enslaved.
Jarvis Christian Institute is founded, modeled on the Southern Christian Institute west of Jackson in Edwards, Mississippi. Thomas Buchanan Frost arrives as the school's first superintendent and Charles Albert Berry as its first principal. Frost's family would stay tied to the school for generations — more than a century later, his great-granddaughter would enroll there as an MBA student. Of the twelve Black schools founded by the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), Jarvis is the only one still standing.
Formal instruction begins on January 13, 1913, with exactly twelve students, all in the elementary grades. The first classes are held in the remains of an old logging camp on the donated land. Later a cabin is raised that becomes the school's first multi-purpose building — classroom, chapel, and meeting hall in one. Everything at Jarvis starts from almost nothing, and the students and staff build it with their own hands.
James Nelson Ervin becomes the first president of Jarvis and holds the office for twenty-four years, until 1938. In his very first year he adds high school classes to the curriculum, making Jarvis one of the few places in East Texas where a Black student could complete a high school education. Some college-level work is offered as early as 1916. Ervin is remembered as the 'Booker T. Washington of Texas' for his philosophy of self-reliant, industrial Black education.
The executive committee of the National Women's Board votes to appropriate $1,000 for a sawmill, which is purchased and installed on campus. From the 1920s through the 1940s, male students run the mill every summer, cutting lumber for campus buildings and firewood for the furnaces and stoves that heat the school in winter. Most of the buildings erected on the Jarvis campus between the 1920s and 1940s are built from this mill's wood. Most of those buildings later burn — one reason so little of early Jarvis survives.
Arnett 'Ace' Mumford becomes head football coach at Jarvis, coaching from 1924 to 1926. It is the first stop in what becomes one of the great coaching careers in Black college football: Mumford coaches HBCUs in Texas and Louisiana from 1924 to 1961 and is eventually inducted into at least eight halls of fame. Jarvis football competes from the 1910s onward, and in these years the Bulldogs are part of the rough-and-tumble world of segregated Texas Black college football.
Jarvis begins offering junior college courses in 1927, a decisive step up from its elementary and high school roots. In 1928 the school incorporates as a college, and in 1929 the name becomes Jarvis Christian College. The climb is slow and deliberate: elementary school to high school to junior college to full college, one accreditation battle at a time. For Black East Texas, each step means another rung of education that did not exist before.
The Emma B. Smith Building is constructed to house the college's administration offices. It survives to this day as the only campus structure left from the Ervin presidency — every other building from those decades is gone, most of them lost to fire. The building stands as a physical reminder of how fragile the early campus was and how much of Jarvis's first half-century exists now only in photographs and memory.
Jarvis introduces senior college course offerings in 1937, completing the climb to a four-year institution. The same year, high school work is eliminated from the curriculum — until 1937, Jarvis had been the only accredited high school exclusively for Black students in the area. In 1938, Peter Clarence Washington begins his tenure as the second president of Jarvis Christian College. The school is no longer filling in the gaps of a segregated system; it is becoming a college in full.
The state of Texas grants a formal charter to Jarvis Christian College in 1939. After nearly three decades of operating on missionary money and willpower, the school has the state's legal recognition. The charter cements what the Jarvis family deed started: a permanent Black college on East Texas soil, built for a people the state itself would not educate.
John B. Eubanks becomes Executive Vice President of Jarvis in 1949 and introduces the general education program — a real curriculum, not just trade training. His work earns the school recognition from the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools in 1950, the regional accreditation that makes Jarvis degrees mean something beyond Hawkins. Eubanks becomes the fourth president of the college in 1951. Accreditation is the quiet milestone that lets every later Jarvis graduate walk into a graduate school or a job with a credential that counts.
Cleo Walter Blackburn becomes president of Jarvis Christian College in 1953. His long tenure carries the school through the civil rights era. In 1964 he secures an affiliation with Texas Christian University — a formal partnership between the tiny Black college and a major white Texas university — that is renewed twice before ending in 1976. That same year, 1964, the old agro-industrial offerings are eliminated from the curriculum as Jarvis completes its shift from industrial school to liberal arts college.
Jarvis Christian discontinues its college football team in 1964, ending a program that had run since the 1910s. The Associated Press marks the moment in the Corpus Christi Caller-Times under the headline '1 Less College Team in Texas.' Louis Crews, who coached the Bulldogs from 1957 to 1959, goes on to build the football program at Alabama State. Without football, Jarvis athletics narrows to basketball, track, and the sports that still carry the Bulldogs today.
The Olin Library and Communication Center opens to students in 1965, giving Jarvis its first modern library. In a school where the oldest surviving building dated to 1936 and most early structures had burned, a real library is a statement: Jarvis intends to be a permanent academic institution, not a missionary outpost. The library becomes the intellectual center of a campus that is finally building in brick instead of sawmill pine.
Perpener becomes the fifth president of Jarvis in 1966 — the first alumnus ever appointed to the office, proof the school is now producing its own leaders. That same year Jarvis is granted full membership in the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, and in 1967 it joins the Texas Association of Developing Colleges, a six-college consortium of historically Black schools. In 1969 the Charles A. Meyer Science and Mathematics Center opens, putting real laboratories on a campus that started in a logging camp.
The E.W. Rand Health, Physical Education and Recreation Center is dedicated on December 1, 1979 — the same month Dr. E.W. Rand retires from the presidency. The building carries his name and houses the varsity gymnasium that later becomes Anthony Robinson Varsity Gymnasium, the home of Bulldog basketball and of homecoming concerts. Four additional residence halls had already opened across the 1970s as enrollment grew.
Dr. Charles Albert Berry Jr., an alumnus of Jarvis Christian College, becomes the eighth president on January 1, 1980. His first year brings a landmark legal moment: in 1981, the official title to the original Jarvis land is transferred from the United Christian Missionary Society to Jarvis Christian College itself — the school finally owns, outright, the ground it was founded on. Around the same time, the alumni of the Southern Christian Institute — the Mississippi school Jarvis was modeled on — merge with the Jarvis National Alumni and Ex-Students, closing a circle that began in 1912.
The James Nelson Ervin Religion and Culture Center is completed in 1983, named for the school's first president. It consists of two structures: the Smith-Howard Chapel and the Peoples-Dickson Religion Building. For a school founded by a church and built on faith, the center is the spiritual heart of campus — the chapel that hosts convocations, worship services, and the homecoming gatherings that define Jarvis life. Two more residence halls follow in 1986, and a twelve-unit student-parent apartment complex in 1988.
Dr. Sebetha Lee Jenkins becomes the tenth president of Jarvis Christian College on January 1, 1991 — the first woman to hold the office in the school's history. She serves eighteen years, retiring in 2008, and the Texas House of Representatives honors her with a formal resolution on her retirement. Under Jenkins, enrollment climbs to its highest levels ever, alumni giving surges, and the campus gains the Sebetha Jenkins Living and Learning Complex and the Ronald L. Hay Student Services Center. President Bill Clinton appoints her to the President's Board of Advisors on Historically Black Colleges and Universities. She is the president who modernizes Jarvis.
The Tom Joyner Foundation names Jarvis Christian College its 'College of the Month' for October 2001, and Congressman Max Sandlin rises in the U.S. House to say so on the record. Joyner's nationally syndicated radio show raises money all month from alumni and listeners, with Ronald McDonald House Charities matching fifty cents on every dollar, up to $333,000. For a school of a few hundred students in rural East Texas, a month on the Tom Joyner Morning Show is the biggest national spotlight Jarvis has ever had.
Jarvis Christian men's basketball reaches the NAIA Men's Division I Basketball Tournament in 2003 — the first of three trips, with return visits in 2008 and 2009. For a tiny NAIA school with no football and a fraction of the budget of its opponents, three national tournament appearances in six years is the high-water mark of Bulldog athletics. In 2021 the women's track and field team wins the Red River Athletic Conference championship, the program's biggest title since the basketball runs.
Dr. Lester C. Newman becomes the twelfth president of Jarvis Christian College in 2012 and serves eleven years before retiring in 2023 after a forty-seven-year career in higher education. Newman, a Southern University graduate who came over from nearby Wiley College, stabilizes the school's finances, grows enrollment, and restores athletic programs. He adds mass communication, cybersecurity, and healthcare management degrees, opens a satellite teaching site in Dallas at the Redbird Mall in 2017 for adult learners, and builds a $40,000 esports and gaming lab. In 2022 Jarvis is named one of nineteen Fulbright HBCU Institutional Leaders — and the only HBCU among twenty-five 'educational gems' in the state of Texas.
Jarvis Christian College establishes its marching band program in 2015 as the Sophisticated Sounds of Soul — S3 for short — under founding director Dr. Rodney D. Chism. For a school that had gone more than a century without a marching band, S3 changes the sound of campus overnight. The band performs at local, state, regional, and national venues, marches at basketball games and homecoming, and offers scholarships that draw musicians to Hawkins. A century after the first twelve students learned in a logging camp, Jarvis finally has a band.
After approval to offer master's degrees in business administration and criminal justice, Jarvis Christian College becomes Jarvis Christian University. The new name, signage, and logos are unveiled on May 6, 2022, and the next day the first graduating class receives the first diplomas ever bearing the name Jarvis Christian University. The first graduate programs — an MBA and a Master of Science in Criminal Justice — begin online in January 2023. That fall, former Grambling band legend Dr. Larry J. Pannell, who led the World Famed Tiger Marching Band for twenty-six years, comes out of retirement to serve as JCU's interim band director for the 2022–2023 year; Michael Ray Bradley Jr. is named band director in 2023.
Dr. Glenell M. Lee-Pruitt becomes the thirteenth president of Jarvis Christian University on July 1, 2023, succeeding the retiring Lester Newman. She had served as the school's provost and vice president for academic affairs since 2012 — eleven years as the institution's second-in-command before taking the top job. An ordained elder in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, she holds a bachelor's and a Ph.D. in social work from Jackson State, a master's from Temple, and a Master of Divinity from Payne Theological Seminary. Her investiture on March 21, 2024, anchors the 112th Founders Homecoming Week. On her watch the school launches two online graduate programs, deepens its adult-learner mission, and in 2025 lands a $1 million permanent endowment gift through UNCF's Dimon Fund.
Jarvis revives its homecoming step show for the first time since 2018, packing the E.W. Rand Gymnasium on March 22, 2025. Zeta Phi Beta takes first place, Kappa Alpha Psi second, Phi Beta Sigma third, in a night the school calls a celebration of Divine Nine culture on campus. The night before, soul legend Eddie Levert of The O'Jays headlines the Pioneer Hall of Fame Gala Concert in the Anthony Robinson Varsity Gym — 'Love Train' live in Hawkins, Texas. The same year, UNCF announces Jarvis is one of twelve member schools receiving $1 million in permanent endowment capital from Jamie and Judy Dimon's historic gift. A 113-year-old school, still finding new ways to be loud.
The RRAC rivalry with real recent blood in it. In February 2025, Huston-Tillotson hosted Jarvis with the final Red River Athletic Conference tournament berth on the line — the Rams won 57-46 in front of a sellout homecoming crowd at Mary E. Branch Gymnasium in Austin. Two weeks earlier, Jarvis had beaten HT 69-66 in Hawkins in what the HT site called 'one of the RRAC's most hostile environments.' The HT athletics site itself called them 'two rivals heading in opposite directions.' With both schools as small Texas HBCUs fighting for the same postseason spots, this is the closest thing Jarvis has to a blood feud.
The East Texas neighbor war: Texas College sits in Tyler, roughly 30 miles from Hawkins, and the two meet regularly in RRAC play. In January 2026 Jarvis beat the Steers 71-59 to snap a skid, with the win noted in UNT Dallas's scouting report as the Bulldogs' get-right game. A full-game broadcast of 'Texas College vs Jarvis Christian University' men's basketball circulates on YouTube — the kind of game both fan bases actually watch. Proximity plus conference stakes make this the geographic rivalry.
The other historic Black college of East Texas — Wiley sits in Marshall, about 45 miles east of Hawkins — and a natural rival by geography and mission. Both are small Disciples-adjacent Texas HBCUs competing in the RRAC, and Jarvis's own 12th president, Lester Newman, came to Hawkins from Wiley. No named rivalry game or trophy is documented in the sources checked, so this one is marked unverified as a formal rivalry.
🥁 Sophisticated Sounds of Soul (S3) · since 2015
Jarvis went more than a century without a marching band, then got one all at once: the Sophisticated Sounds of Soul were established in 2015 and changed the sound of the campus. With no football team, S3 marches at basketball games, homecoming, parades, and community events, with band scholarships drawing players to Hawkins. The music department also runs concert band, jazz band, brass band, jazz combo, and the university choir, and recently added a Bachelor of Music Education degree. The Pannell interlude — a Grambling icon spending a year in Hawkins — is the most famous chapter in the band's short history.
Founding director of the marching band program. Built S3 from nothing in 2015 into a band performing at local, state, regional, and national venues — the first marching band in the school's 100-plus-year history.
The Grambling legend: 26 years leading the World Famed Grambling State Tiger Marching Band, performing for five U.S. presidents, at two Obama inauguration parades and George W. Bush's, in 'The Great Debaters' and 'Drumline,' and at Super Bowl XXXII's Motown halftime. Came out of retirement when his childhood friend President Lester Newman — they played clarinet and saxophone together growing up in Shreveport — asked him to build up the JCU band. Directed the April 2023 President's Spring Concert honoring Newman's retirement.
Named director of the band at Jarvis Christian University in 2023, succeeding Pannell. Came to Hawkins after years as a band director in Louisiana middle and high schools — a school-band builder taking over a young college program.
The Divine Nine are a visible force on this small campus. The 2025 homecoming step show — the first university-sponsored one since 2018 — drew AKA's Zeta Chi, Kappa Alpha Psi's Zeta Xi, Delta Sigma Theta's Phi Beta, Zeta Phi Beta's Epsilon Zeta, and Phi Beta Sigma's Zeta Delta to a packed E.W. Rand Gymnasium, with Zeta Phi Beta taking first place, Kappa second, and Sigma third. Chapter-level detail beyond the step-show lineup comes from a fan wiki and is unverified.
Still digging this up — check back soon.
Built to house the administration offices, and still standing as the only campus structure surviving from the Ervin presidency. Every other building from the 1920s-1940s era is gone — most of them wooden structures from the campus sawmill that eventually burned. The Smith Building is the oldest physical link to the school's first half-century.
Opened to students in 1965, giving Jarvis its first modern library. On a campus where the oldest surviving building dated to 1936, a real library was a declaration that Jarvis intended to be a permanent academic institution. It became the intellectual center of the campus through the late twentieth century.
Opened in 1969, putting genuine science laboratories on a campus that began in a logging camp. The Meyer Center's auditorium is still in use for major campus events — in 2024 it hosted 'An Evening with Madame President' during the 112th Founders Homecoming Week. A cornerstone of the 1960s building wave under the Perpener presidency.
Four additional residence halls opened across the 1970s as enrollment grew, the first large-scale student housing expansion in school history. On a rural campus where nearly everyone lives on site — about 85% of undergraduates still live in college housing today — dormitory capacity is the ceiling on growth, and the 1970s raised it.
Dedicated December 1, 1979, the same month Dr. E.W. Rand retired from the presidency, and named in his honor. It houses the Anthony Robinson Varsity Gymnasium — home of Bulldog basketball, the 2022 and 2023 homecoming concerts (K Camp, Eddie Levert), the revived 2025 step show, and commencement ceremonies. It is the busiest building on campus.
Completed in 1983 and named for the school's first president, consisting of two structures: the Smith-Howard Chapel and the Peoples-Dickson Religion Building. For a school founded by a church and built on faith, this is the spiritual heart of campus — chapel convocations, the J.N. Ervin Founders Convocation at homecoming, worship services, and the Pre-Investiture Worship Service for the 13th president in 2024 all happen here.
Two additional residence halls — one for men, one for women — were dedicated in 1986, and a twelve-unit student-parent apartment complex followed in 1988. The apartment complex was a quiet innovation: housing for students raising children, acknowledging that Jarvis serves many nontraditional and parenting students, a mission the school later formalized with its adult-learner Renaissance program.
Built during the Jenkins presidency (1991-2008), when enrollment climbed to its highest levels in school history and new facilities finally matched the growth. Named for the tenth president and first woman to lead the school, it stands as the physical signature of the eighteen-year tenure that modernized Jarvis.
Built during the Jenkins-era expansion to consolidate student services in one place. Dr. Ronald Hay is a longtime Jarvis figure — the National Alumni Association's 2011 video project 'Dr. Ronald Hay Talks with Jarvis Students' shows his standing with graduates. The center anchors the administrative side of student life on the Hawkins campus.
In August 2017 Jarvis opened a satellite instructional site at the Redbird Mall (Southwest Center Mall) in Dallas, about 100 miles west of Hawkins, offering criminal justice, business management, religion, data analytics, and cybersecurity. President Newman framed it as the school's move into adult degree completion — Jarvis going to where the working students are, instead of waiting for them to come to Wood County.
Jarvis opened a new esports and gaming lab featuring $40,000 in new gaming equipment, cited by the NAIA in its 2023 Black History Month celebration of the school. For a 700-student HBCU in rural East Texas, a serious esports facility is a deliberate play for a generation of students — and it came the same year Jarvis was named one of 19 Fulbright HBCU Institutional Leaders.
U.S. Representative Lance Gooden requested federal funding in May 2025 to convert an existing campus building into a state-of-the-art Workforce Training and Cybersecurity Center serving students and surrounding county residents, plus an overhaul of the campus's outdated chiller-based HVAC system. The request frames it plainly: a rural East Texas HBCU addressing critical workforce and infrastructure needs at once. Funding status was not confirmed in the sources checked.
Jarvis houses a regional biological specimen collection in its 10,000-square-foot Frost Hall — herbarium and entomology collections with smaller holdings in other natural history areas, plus historical materials on natural history and land use. Named for the founding Frost family, it is an unusual asset for a small liberal arts HBCU: a working research collection on a thousand-acre East Texas campus.
Jarvis is a small shop — the org chart reads like a family business, and several senior staff are alumni. The athletic director and current head coaches could not be verified from the sources opened (older sources name Byron Rimm and William Sperow II as past men's basketball coaches). The music department is the most decorated corner of the faculty, with the S3 band program and its succession of directors — Chism, Pannell, Bradley — as the headline act.
In office since July 1, 2023; provost and VP for academic affairs 2012-2023. Ordained AME elder; Jackson State (BSW, PhD social work), Temple (MSW), Payne Theological Seminary (MDiv).
The public face of Jarvis fundraising — quoted on the Eddie Levert homecoming gala and the UNCF Dimon gift; selected to present nationally on charitable gift planning ('The Last Tithe') in 2026.
Led the revival of the homecoming step show in 2025 after a seven-year hiatus, calling it 'an expression of identity, tradition, and excellence.'
A 2019 Jarvis graduate (social work), 2018-2019 Mr. Jarvis, former SGA officer and S3 percussionist, Phi Beta Sigma member — hired to build young-alumni engagement.
Jarvis alumnus and senior pastor since 2015; frequently speaks for the university on its church ties and legacy.
Jarvis feels like a big family reunion that happens to be a college. About 85% of undergraduates live on campus in the pine woods of Wood County, and with only around 700 students, everybody knows everybody — the student activities list runs to a student newspaper, radio station, TV station, marching band, choirs, SGA, NAACP chapter, STEM club, and the Pre-Alumni Council. It is a faith-based school, so worship services and Bible study sit alongside talent shows and film nights. Hawkins itself is a small town; Tyler and Longview are the nearest real cities, and students mostly make their own fun on the thousand acres. Homecoming in March — not fall, since there is no football — is the week the whole year orbits around.