Jackson, Tennessee · Founded 1882 · Dragons
“Jackson, Tennessee's CME-founded HBCU — home of the Dragons, the Quiet Storm marching band, and Super Bowl hero Jacoby Jones.”
Full Quiet Storm field performance from 2019, featuring Cane Ridge High School — the band's modern show style on display.
SIAC 5th-quarter band battle: Quiet Storm trades with Kentucky State's Thorobreds horn-for-horn after the game.
Behind-the-scenes look at Quiet Storm band camp 2019 — the grind before the season.
Killa Kev Productions captures the Quiet Storm's 2015 rendition of Rae Sremmurd's 'Throw Sum Mo' in 1080p.
The 'Bloody Rain' percussion section warming up in 2015 — the drumline's raw sound up close.
The Quiet Storm and Central State's band perform at the 2025 Frederick Douglass HBCU Classic in Rochester, NY — Lane on a national classic stage.
Recap of Alabama State's 34-0 blanking of Lane in the September 5, 2026 Labor Day Classic at ASU Stadium.
Bloody Rain battles Grambling's famed Chocolate Thunder drumline at the 2025 Battle of the Drums — Lane's percussion on the biggest drum-battle stage.
2019 percussion battle: Bloody Rain vs Coahoma's CorrupCion, shot by Killa Kev Productions.
The 2018 edition of the Bloody Rain vs Coahoma drum battle — a recurring percussion rivalry.
Oral history of how and when the marching band started at Lane, naming directors Kenneth Sampson, Oliver Hewitt, and Kenneth Martin — the band's origin story in one video.
Miles and Lane sousaphone sections battle on the field after the 2016 5th quarter — tubas settling the rivalry.
Class of 2007 — NFL wide receiver/returner; first player in history to score a receiving TD and a return TD in a Super Bowl (XLVII with the Ravens), owner of the 109-yard kickoff return, the longest play in Super Bowl history; drafted by the Houston Texans in 2007; later coached at Lane.
Class of 1947 — civil rights lawyer who became the first African-American named regional director of a U.S. government agency (the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission).
Class of 1959 — legendary bassist with recording credits on thousands of tracks, one of the most recorded musicians in popular music history.
Class of 1997 — former NFL running back, part of Lane's pipeline of five NFL players.
Class of 2001 — former professional football player.
Professional baseball player who reached the major leagues out of tiny Lane College.
Class of 1934 — pioneering African-American record promoter who broke Black artists into mainstream radio and retail.
Class of 2000 — mechanical engineer and professor, a STEM standout from a liberal-arts HBCU.
Class of 1936 — Liberian educator and writer whose autobiography became a landmark of African literature.
Class of 1892 — clubwoman and professor of medical Latin, botany, and materia medica at the University of West Tennessee.
Class of 1893 — Methodist minister, educator, and author from Lane's earliest college classes.
Poet and schoolteacher hailed by the Chicago Tribune as an authentic American voice.
Politician, real estate developer, and state legislator in Missouri.
Lawyer and judge in St. Louis involved in prominent civil rights cases.
Lane alumnus, entrepreneur, and global business executive who keynoted the Voices of Leadership series at President Comer's 2026 inauguration.
The Colored Methodist Episcopal Church in America was formed in 1870 by formerly enslaved Methodists in the South, and it is now known as the Christian Methodist Episcopal (CME) Church. From its first days the young denomination put schooling at the very top of its priorities, because educating newly freed Black people after the Civil War was seen as sacred work. Lane College's own official history traces the school's origin directly to this founding moment. Everything that followed — the conferences, the resolutions, the land purchase — flowed from the CME Church's conviction that freedom without education was incomplete.
In November 1878 the CME Church's Tennessee Annual Conference met at the old Capers Chapel CME Church in Nashville, with the denomination's first bishop, William H. Miles, presiding. The Reverend J. K. Daniels stood and presented a resolution to establish a Tennessee school for the denomination. The resolution was adopted amid applause, and a committee was appointed to raise money and buy a site: Reverends C. H. Lee, J. H. Ridley, Sandy Rivers, Barry Smith, and J. K. Daniels himself. It was the paper birth of what would become Lane College.
The great yellow fever epidemic of 1878 swept through the region just as the committee began its work, and the outbreak hindered every part of the school-building effort. Travel was dangerous, fundraising was impossible, and the plan sat idle while the disease ran its course. For a full year the school existed only as a resolution and a committee. The delay became part of the college's founding lore — a reminder that Lane was born in a season of suffering.
In 1879 Bishop Isaac Lane was appointed to preside over the Tennessee Conference, and that appointment turned the stalled plan around. Lane met with the committee, gave them practical advice, and began formulating the school that would be called the CME High School. With his own hand he purchased the first four acres of land for the new school — in the eastern part of Jackson, Tennessee — for $240. A man born into slavery in 1834 was now buying land to educate free Black children, and the school would eventually carry his name.
On November 12, 1882, the CME High School began its first session under its first principal and teacher, Miss Jennie E. Lane — the founder's own daughter. The school's stated purpose was the education of newly freed enslaved persons, and its original curriculum was aimed at preparing 'teachers and preachers.' That first day of school, in the college's own telling, marked the beginning of a commitment to uplift people throughout the South, the nation, and the world. From a four-acre plot in east Jackson, Lane began its long climb.
Miss Jennie Lane married CME minister Nelson Caldwell Cleaves, and in January 1883 Professor J. H. Harper of Jackson took over her unexpired term. That spring Bishop Lane recruited the Reverend Dr. Charles H. (C. H.) Phillips to serve as principal, with Phillips's wife serving as teacher, and their tenure began in October 1883. Under Dr. Phillips the school developed its first real curriculum and published its first catalog, deliberately gearing coursework toward producing preachers and teachers for Black communities. Phillips resigned in the summer of 1885, and the Reverend T. J. Austin succeeded him until 1887.
In 1884 the school's name was changed to Lane Institute, an explicit acknowledgment of Bishop Isaac Lane's vigorous work in founding it. The school was chartered under the laws of the State of Tennessee, giving it legal standing to grow beyond a church high school. The name change signaled ambition: this was no longer just a local school but an institution meant to endure. The 'Institute' name would hold for twelve years.
Lane Institute held its first graduating class in 1887 — just five students: Nelson Caldwell Cleaves, Isaiah C. Davis, Ida Lane Burrows, Marie E. Payne, and Edward E. Smith. Cleaves would go on to become a bishop of the CME Church and a future chair of the Lane College Board of Trustees. That September the Reverend T. F. Saunders, a member of the Memphis Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, was appointed the first president of Lane Institute. Saunders, notably, was a white former enslaver — a choice Bishop Lane made deliberately to smooth the school's path to recognition as it sought college status.
During Saunders's presidency the need for a college department became clear, and in 1896 that department was formally organized. The Board of Trustees voted to change the name from Lane Institute to Lane College, and the curriculum broadened into classical studies, the natural and physical sciences, and mathematics. The high school that had opened in 1882 with one teacher was now a college. Around 1902, letters poured into the Christian Index, the CME Church's magazine, demanding a Black president for the school.
In 1903, after T. F. Saunders resigned, the Reverend James Albert Bray — a Black graduate of Atlanta University, now Clark Atlanta University — was elected president of Lane College. Bray served until 1907, and during his tenure the present administration building was erected; it still anchors the campus as Bray Hall. He was later elected a bishop in the CME Church. His election answered the grassroots campaign in the Christian Index and marked a turning point in Black self-determination at the school.
In 1907 Dr. James Franklin Lane, the founder's son, was chosen as president and would serve for thirty-seven years — the longest tenure in the college's history. During his administration the college improved its educational facilities and physical plant, and it attracted the attention of major philanthropies: the General Education Board of the Rosenwald Foundation and the Board of Missions of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South both gave liberal contributions. Those gifts put Lane on firmer financial and academic footing than it had ever known. Dr. Lane died in office on December 11, 1944.
In 1936 Lane College became one of the few Black schools approved by the Southern Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools, receiving a 'B' rating and partial accreditation. That sounds modest, but partial accreditation was the only level the Southern Association gave to Negro schools at the time — it was the ceiling, not a compromise. For a small Black college in Jim Crow Tennessee, even that recognition was a hard-won mark of legitimacy. Full membership would not come until December 1961.
The death of James Franklin Lane in December 1944 opened a turbulent stretch for the college. The Reverend Peter Randolph Shy — later elected a CME bishop — served as acting president until Dr. D. S. Yarbrough was elected in 1945. Yarbrough served until 1948, when Professor James H. White succeeded him, and in 1950 Professor Richard H. Sewell, the Dean of Instruction, became acting president. Four leaders in six years tested the school's stability, but it held together until a long-term president arrived in 1950.
The Reverend Dr. Chester Arthur Kirkendoll was elected president in 1950 and served twenty years, finally giving Lane the steady hand it needed. Under his leadership the college earned full accreditation from the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools — capped by admission to full membership in December 1961 — and the physical plant grew dramatically: Smith Hall, Graves Hall (formerly Jubilee Hall), Hamlett Hall, and the Student Union Building were all erected. Kirkendoll's tenure ended in May 1970 when he was elected a bishop of the CME Church, the second Lane president to rise to that office. His era moved Lane from survival to respectability.
Dr. Herman Stone Jr., who had served as Dean of the College for ten years, was elected president in July 1970. During his sixteen-year presidency Lane's accreditation was reaffirmed twice by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, and the J. F. Lane Health and Physical Education Building was added to the campus. Stone was an insider who knew the school's machinery, and he ran it with quiet competence. He retired in May 1986, and Dr. Alex A. Chambers took office on June 1, 1986.
Dr. Alex A. Chambers won reaffirmation of accreditation from the Southern Association's Commission on Colleges in 1991 and secured a grant from the U.S. Department of the Interior's Historic Preservation Program to restore Cleaves Hall, Saunders Hall, the J. K. Daniels Building, and the Old President's Home to their original appearance. Those buildings, together with the Bray Administration Building and the Old Central Heating Plant, became the Lane College Historic District — designated by the Department of the Interior in 1988 and listed on the National Register of Historic Places on July 2, 1987. Chambers died after a short illness on March 18, 1992, and Dr. Arthur L. David, a 1960 alumnus serving as Dean of the College, stepped in as interim president.
On August 20, 1992, the Board of Trustees named Dr. Wesley Cornelious McClure — a 1964 alumnus — as the ninth president, and he took office September 1. His twenty-one-year tenure brought unprecedented growth: enrollment surged, finances stabilized, faculty strength improved, the curriculum expanded, and the physical plant was modernized and enlarged. The $5.2 million Chambers-McClure Academic Center was completed in 1997, and between 2006 and 2009 the college executed some of the most aggressive enrollment and facilities expansions in its history — enrollment leapt from 672 in 2001 to 2,250 in fall 2009, a 235 percent increase. Dr. McClure died after a short illness in December 2013, closing the longest continuous presidency since the founder's son.
On February 3, 2013, former Lane College football player Jacoby Jones — drafted out of Lane by the Houston Texans in 2007 and then with the Baltimore Ravens — became the first player in history to score both a receiving touchdown and a return touchdown in a Super Bowl. His 109-yard kickoff return remains the longest play in Super Bowl history, and his 70-yard touchdown catch in the final minutes helped seal the Ravens' win over San Francisco. The New York Times chronicled his return to New Orleans, the city where he grew up, for the game. Jones later came home to serve as a football coach at Lane College, closing the loop between the school and its most famous athlete.
On June 12, 2014, the Board of Trustees named Dr. Logan Hampton the tenth president, and he took office committed to advancing the college's mission. He launched the Power of Potential Scholars Program in 2015, expanded online course offerings with SACSCOC approval, and in the 2018-19 academic year the Lady Dragons made history as SIAC Women's Basketball Champions — a milestone the college's own history calls out by name. When COVID-19 hit, Lane pivoted to online and hybrid instruction from March 2020 through spring 2021, and in June 2020 Hampton testified before the U.S. Senate at Senator Lamar Alexander's invitation, asking for $1 billion for HBCUs; the December 2020 stimulus delivered $1.7 billion for HBCUs plus Pell increases and HBCU loan forgiveness. The 2023 opening of the CVS Workforce Innovation Talent Center and a nursing partnership with the University of Tennessee Health Science Center capped his academic expansion. He announced in June 2024 that he would step down at the end of July.
In August 2021 the Lane College Athletic Department, under Director of Athletics Derrick Burroughs, announced its Hall of Fame Class of 2021 — headlined by the entire 1982 Lane College football team. The class also honored John Green of the class of 1964 with a Lifetime Achievement award for five decades of booster support, football players Eric Brent and Sherard Ellis, coaches T. Willie Tyson and Carolyn Jackson, and softball standouts Jasmine McNeil and Shawnae Campbell. The induction banquet, held during Homecoming weekend after a COVID-driven cancellation the year before, drew the old team back to Jackson. It was Lane's way of telling its athletes that what they built still matters.
On July 12, 2024, Dr. Donald W. Comer was named interim president, taking office August 1 — no stranger to the school, having received its Friend of Lane College Award in 2022 after more than three decades as a FedEx executive who helped build the Lane-FedEx relationship. He set six pillars for the college under the theme 'The Next Level of Excellence': academic excellence, experiential learning, strategic enrollment growth, financial vitality, community engagement, and differential advantage. His tenure has added the Shy Hall Experiential Learning Media Lab — a production, podcasting, and broadcasting hub — a biotechnology lab in the Greer-Armour Building, a new School of Religion and Education, and a $150,000 Tennessee grant to turn the football practice field into a multi-use wellness space. In April 2026 the board named him the eleventh president, and he was formally inaugurated August 20-21, 2026, in Graves Auditorium under the theme 'A Moment in Time. A Legacy in Motion.'
During World War II a Merchant Marine Victory ship was named the SS Lane Victory in honor of Lane College — one of the few such honors given to a Black college. The ship survived the war and is still afloat in San Pedro, California, where it serves as a museum ship in the Los Angeles harbor area. Bishop Isaac Lane's name thus sailed the Pacific on a vessel named for the school he founded. It remains one of the most unusual tributes any HBCU has ever received.
Lane's most lopsided and most storied series: the schools had met 22 times by 2017, with Tuskegee winning every single meeting, including a 38-7 rout in Tuskegee in 2016. The neutral-site Bluff City Classic in Memphis gave the matchup a showcase stage — Tuskegee took a 35-31 shootout there — and as recently as November 2, 2025, Tuskegee edged Lane 18-13. For Lane, beating Tuskegee remains the white whale.
An annual SIAC West collision with a band rivalry to match: after a 5th-quarter battle in 2016, the Miles and Lane sousaphone sections faced off on the field in a tuba showdown captured on video. On the gridiron the schools trade home-and-home dates deep in the conference schedule most years. It is the rare rivalry where the brass battle gets as much replay as the football.
A fellow SIAC West program whose Mighty Marching Thorobreds have gone head-to-head with Lane's Quiet Storm in documented 5th-quarter battles. The band footage draws more eyes than the box scores, which tells you how this rivalry really lives — in the stands, after the game, horn to horn.
Newer bad blood with a classic finish: at Lane's 2024 homecoming, Central State took a late lead before Carl Pitts caught a tipped pass and went 64 yards for the go-ahead score, then hauled in a 4th-and-18 heave for 68 yards to set up the winning QB sneak — with Varian Terry intercepting on the goal line as time expired to seal it. Games like that mint rivalries fast.
🥁 Quiet Storm Marching Band
The Quiet Storm — also billed as the Marching Quiet Storm and '1000 Watts of Sound' — is Lane's marching identity, and its percussion section marches under the name 'Bloody Rain.' Killa Kev Productions has documented the band for a decade: 5th-quarter battles against Kentucky State's Thorobreds and Langston, drum battles against Grambling's 'Chocolate Thunder' at the 2025 Battle of the Drums and Coahoma's 'CorrupCion,' and a sousaphone showdown with Miles College. The band led Lane's 2014 homecoming parade through Jackson, and a band-history video traces its lineage through directors including Sampson, Oliver Hewitt, and Kenneth Martin.
Took over Lane's bands in 1967 and built a program famous for its heavy, unconventional use of women — tubas, drums, trombones, trumpets, section leaders, even designers of uniforms and marching routines — at a time when most bands barred women from all of it. A 1976 Indianapolis Recorder profile noted his band even carried a vocalist, a rarity in marching bands. Exact end year unverified.
Listed in professional records as a professor and director of bands at Lane College; his exact tenure could not be confirmed in the sources opened. He went on to lead fine-arts programs across several school districts.
Known as 'Jeffo,' the current Director of Bands per the band's own 2026 posts. He leads the Quiet Storm at games, parades, and events like the Krewe of Thoth in New Orleans and the Georgia Mass Band gathering, and the program notes that over half its members earned academic honors in 2026.
Two chapters could be verified on the national rolls: Delta Sigma Theta's Beta Chi (1939) and Zeta Phi Beta's Tau Gamma (1968). Lane's small size and CME-church character shape a campus where the band, the choir, homecoming, and Founder's Day carry much of the communal weight that Greek life carries elsewhere; chapter-level detail beyond the two verified chapters needs the college's student-affairs office or yearbook archives.
Still digging this up — check back soon.
The Lane College Historic District — Cleaves Hall, Saunders Hall, the J. K. Daniels Building, and the Old President's Home, restored with a U.S. Department of the Interior Historic Preservation Program grant, plus the Bray Administration Building and the Old Central Heating Plant — was designated by the Department of the Interior in 1988 and listed on the National Register of Historic Places on July 2, 1987. It locked Lane's oldest architecture into protected status and affirmed the campus as a historic Black educational site.
Construction of the Academic Center resumed in 1996 and was completed in 1997; in February 1997 the $5.2 million building was named the Chambers-McClure Academic Center for presidents Alex Chambers and Wesley McClure. It houses the Library/Learning Resource Center, an auditorium, classrooms, seminar rooms, skills laboratories, and a telecommunications center. It remains the academic heart of campus.
The 1905 Bray Administration Building — the 'Crown Jewel' of campus — got a complete $2.2 million interior overhaul beginning in 1997, funded through the U.S. Department of Education and completed in July 2000. The project modernized the oldest administrative space without disturbing its Classical Revival exterior.
Extensive summer-2003 renovations turned The Archives into Water Tower Place, and on November 4, 2004, the Cyber Café opened with a ribbon-cutting. The space doubles as meeting room, coffee house, and quiet study by day, and hosts live entertainment and poetry readings in the evenings — one of the few late-night student social spaces on campus.
In July 2005 the college acquired the FCC license to operate its own radio station, WLCD-FM, housed in the renovated P. R. Shy Hall. Lane became one of only two private colleges in West Tennessee with its own full-time radio station, giving mass-communication students a real broadcast outlet.
The City of Jackson gifted the college the 2,500-to-3,500-seat Rothrock Stadium on Hays Avenue, renamed Lane Field — the home of Dragons football ever since. The same year Lane bought the historic St. Paul CME Church building on its eastern boundary and renamed it The Lighthouse, and added the off-campus Eastbrooke residence hall (76 beds) between March and December.
In summer 2007 the college completed two new residence halls — The Edens and The Orchards, 86 students each — and a new dining facility, Phillips Hall, which a 2009 expansion grew to seat 800. The building spree matched the enrollment surge, which was climbing toward its 2,250 peak.
From summer 2008 through 2009 Lane completed three residence halls — Alumni Hall (86 students) and Harper Hall and Jennie E. Lane Hall (129 each) — plus a 42,000-square-foot Science and Business Building. It was the most aggressive facilities expansion in school history, built to house the 235 percent enrollment jump of the McClure years.
A summer-2010 facelift of the three-block heart of campus along Lane Avenue — decorative streetlights, crosswalks, resurfacing, new sidewalks, landscaping, and brick overlays in front of Cleaves Hall — sharpened the college's public face. The same summer Lane built a pedestrian underpass beneath the West Tennessee Railroad connecting Harper Hall to North campus, and completed the Berry Hall Teaching Learning Center for teacher education.
The 2018-19 academic year brought major renovations to the Kirkendoll Student Union Building: state-of-the-art conference facilities, meeting rooms, student lounges, and office space for Lane Institute and the First-Year and Second-Year Experience programs on the lower level. The J. F. Lane Building's aquatic center and gymnasium floor were also renovated, along with dorm bathrooms and computer labs across Cleaves, Hamlett, Graves, and Smith halls.
In 2023 Lane opened the CVS Workforce Innovation Talent Center, a state-of-the-art retail pharmacy training program, alongside a nursing program partnership with the University of Tennessee Health Science Center. Both moves pushed the college toward workforce-aligned health programming it had never offered before.
Under President Comer the college opened the Shy Hall Experiential Learning Media Lab — a production, podcasting, and broadcasting hub with advertising and sponsorship pathways — added a biotechnology lab in the Greer-Armour Building for a new Biotech Certificate Program, and secured a $150,000 Tennessee grant to convert the football practice field into a multi-use wellness space with a new outdoor volleyball facility and reflection zones around the campus pond.
Lane runs lean, as small private HBCUs do — the president, the AD, and the band director are the most visible figures. The head football coach and provost could not be confirmed from sources opened. The coaching lineage matters here because Lane has produced five NFL players, an unusually rich football pipeline for a school of 800 students.
Former FedEx executive; inaugurated as eleventh president August 2026.
Announced the 2021 Hall of Fame class; leads the Dragons' SIAC athletic program.
Leads the Quiet Storm Marching Band.
Super Bowl XLVII hero who returned to coach at his alma mater.
Lane is small — around 800 students on 55 urban acres in east Jackson — and it feels like a family where everybody knows everybody's business. The CME Church roots run deep: gospel culture, spiritual-life programming, and bishops at the podium are part of the rhythm, not decoration. Homecoming is the week the whole city feels it, with the parade rolling through Jackson and alumni from the McClure boom years packing Lane Field. The bond with east Jackson is explicit — the college describes its celebrations as community events, and the community shows up.