Memphis, Tennessee · Founded 1862 · Magicians
“Memphis's only HBCU — a small South Memphis college that taught freedpeople by candlelight in 1862, produced two big-city mayors and the NAACP's longest-serving chief, and owns the only NCAA basketball crown in Tennessee history.”
The 'Majestic Sounds Of The South' marching in the 2026 Krewe of Morephus Parade — the new band's coming-out party on the streets of Memphis.
The band plays the Mardi Gras classic 'Do Whatcha Wanna' to open the 2026 Mardi Gras Memphis Parade downtown.
BougeeTV's stunned reaction video — national band-culture media discovering that tiny LeMoyne-Owen suddenly has a marching band.
The band repping Memphis's own GloRilla at the 2025 Whitehaven Christmas Parade — hometown sound, hometown band.
The band's entrance at Memphis's 901 Day celebration downtown, August 29, 2025 — the city birthday gig.
A1 Media's 4K capture of LOC's floor show at the 2026 'Welcome To Egypt' Battle of the Bands — the new program stepping into battle culture.
An early meet-the-band showcase introducing the musicians behind the new program to the community.
Full 156th commencement — the college's core-values sendoff for its graduates.
The 2024 commencement with guest speaker Kim Seymour (Etsy, WeightWatchers, AmEx, GE) — including the moment Richard Williams graduated 51 years after finishing his coursework.
The 2025 graduating class celebration — the newest Magicians crossing the stage.
Dr. Denita Hedgeman's historical prelude production for the college's 150th anniversary at the Cannon Center, October 24, 2012 — Memphis artists, dancers, and musicians telling LOC's story.
WREG News Channel 3 segment on how the college prepares its young men — local TV's look at the mission in action.
Class of 1958 — mayor of Washington, D.C. and D.C. Council member; the most nationally famous LOC graduate.
Class of 1943 — executive director of the NAACP (1977–1992) and later an FCC commissioner; a giant of the civil rights movement.
First Black mayor of Memphis, serving 1992–2009 — the hometown hero who ran the city around the corner from campus.
Class of 1949 — Wisconsin state legislator and civil rights activist who fought school desegregation battles in Milwaukee.
Class of 1910 — Memphis businessman and civil rights organizer from the early-20th-century generation.
Class of 1927 — architect, profiled in the biographical dictionary of African American architects.
Class of 1958 (S.A. Owen Junior College) — mathematician who worked in telecommunications and electronic data transmission, and a philanthropist.
Mayor pro tem of Memphis (July–October 2009), bridging the Herenton and Wharton eras at City Hall.
Class of 1976 — the college's 12th president and its first woman president; former chancellor of Baton Rouge Community College.
President of Florida A&M University — an LOC alumnus now leading one of the nation's largest HBCUs.
Taught at LeMoyne before becoming a Chicago lawyer and civil rights activist.
Magicians golfer — first player in SIAC history to win Player of the Year, all-conference, tournament MVP, and all-tournament first team in one week; 2015 PGA Minority Collegiate champion.
Completed his coursework in 1973 but couldn't afford a $50 balance; after Army service in Vietnam and a full career, he finally walked at commencement in 2024 — 51 years later, the oldest of 108 graduates.
Alumnus and longtime professor who became Rhodes College's first Black professor.
Before the Emancipation Proclamation was even signed, Lucinda Humphrey — a nurse at the Union Army's Camp Shiloh south of Memphis — was holding candlelight sessions to teach escaped enslaved people the alphabet. The American Missionary Association, an integrated body of Black and white Congregational, Methodist, and Presbyterian ministers, sent Humphrey to formalize the effort into an elementary school for freedmen and runaway slaves. It was one of more than ten such schools the AMA planted in the South during the Civil War. The college still counts this as its founding, making it one of the oldest HBCUs in the nation.
Soon after federal troops occupied Memphis, the little school relocated from the camp into the city itself. It took the name Lincoln Chapel, a nod to the president whose war was prying slavery apart. In a city still built on slave labor and cotton money, a school openly educating Black children was a provocation as much as a classroom. That tension would nearly kill it within three years.
When federal troops withdrew from Memphis, white mobs unleashed one of the worst race massacres of the Reconstruction era. Black neighborhoods, churches, and schools were put to the torch — and Lincoln Chapel was destroyed with them. The school's people scattered, and for a moment it looked like the whole experiment was over. But the teachers and students rebuilt. A school that survived being burned down in its first years carried that stubbornness forward for a century and a half.
Lincoln Chapel reopened in 1867 with 150 students and six teachers — a remarkably large school for a Black community that had just watched its neighborhood burn. The AMA kept the doors open through sheer missionary determination. Financial trouble plagued the school for years afterward, but the doors never closed again. That 150-student restart is the seed every later LeMoyne-Owen generation traces itself back to.
Francis Julius LeMoyne, a physician from Washington, Pennsylvania and a noted abolitionist, donated $20,000 — roughly $436,000 in modern money — to the AMA to build an elementary and secondary school in Memphis for training teachers. LeMoyne traveled from Pennsylvania to visit the school himself and donated a clock for its tower. Grateful, the AMA renamed the school the LeMoyne Normal and Commercial School in his honor. A Northerner putting his name on a Southern Black school in 1870 was a deliberate act of Reconstruction-era defiance.
The renamed LeMoyne Normal and Commercial School opened in a new building at 284 Orleans Street in 1871. The school's bell — cast in Troy, New York in 1877 by Meneely & Kimberly, presented by Mr. and Mrs. John R. Love — rang over Orleans Street for decades. That bell survives today on the Walker Avenue campus, recovered from the old site and erected by the class of 1943. It is one of the few physical objects connecting the modern college to its 19th-century self.
The Memphis yellow fever epidemic that began in 1873 tore through the city's population, and the school's personnel were not spared. In a city where the disease emptied whole streets, keeping a school open meant absorbing real human losses among teachers and staff. The school endured, but the epidemic is remembered in the college's history as one of the early crucibles that tested whether the institution would hold. It held.
Under its third principal, Andrew J. Steele, LeMoyne enjoyed roughly three decades of sustained growth and development. Steele's tenure turned a fragile mission school into a genuine institution with deep roots in Black Memphis. His leadership carried the school from the post-Reconstruction wilderness into the twentieth century. When the college moved to Walker Avenue in 1914, it named its first building — and its oldest surviving structure — Steele Hall for him.
In 1914 the school left Orleans Street for its present site on Walker Avenue in South Memphis, where it has sat ever since. Steele Hall, designed by architects Tandy & Foster, went up the same year as the first building on the new campus and remains the oldest structure there. The move anchored the college in the Black South Memphis neighborhood it would serve for the next century. Everything the school later became — the Magicians, the championships, the mayors — happened on Walker Avenue.
LeMoyne became a junior college in 1924 and, after building out a four-year curriculum, a full four-year college in 1930. The State of Tennessee chartered it four years later, in 1934. The upgrade was a statement: Black Memphis deserved not just literacy and teacher training but genuine higher education. Through the Depression and the Jim Crow decades, LeMoyne kept producing the teachers who staffed Memphis and Shelby County's Black public schools — by the early 1950s, some 400 of its graduates were teaching in those systems.
Architect George Awsumb designed the campus quadrangle along with two Colonial Revival buildings, Brownlee Hall and Sweeney Hall, completed in 1936. Brownlee Hall sits at the center of the quad's south side; Sweeney Hall, originally the president's residence, flanks it to the east. The four buildings and the raised quadrangle lawn above Walker Avenue would, seventy years later, become a National Register historic district. The campus's look — Colonial Revival against South Memphis — was set in the middle of the Great Depression.
While LeMoyne grew under the Congregationalist-leaning AMA tradition, the Tennessee Baptist Missionary and Educational Convention bought property on Vance Avenue in 1947 to build its own junior college. It opened in 1954 as S.A. Owen Junior College, named for the Reverend S.A. Owen, a prominent Black religious and civic leader in Memphis. Owen graduated its first class in 1956, earned accreditation in 1958, and joined the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools in 1961. Two small Black colleges, two church traditions, both serving the same city — the stage was set for a merger nobody planned yet.
The three-story Modernist Hollis F. Price Library was built in 1963, designed by Gassner-Nathan-Browne Architects, and named for the college president who led LeMoyne from 1943 to 1970. It gave the campus its first true academic library at the height of the civil rights era, when students were organizing across the South. The same firm later designed the Alma C. Hanson Memorial Student Center and the Gibson-Orgill Science-Mathematics Learning Center. The library remains a contributing building in the campus historic district.
In 1968, fire damaged Roger Williams Hall, a major building on Owen College's Vance Avenue campus — and out of the ashes came a merger. LeMoyne College and Owen College combined to form LeMoyne-Owen College, uniting the AMA/Congregational tradition with the Black Baptist convention's school under one name. The merged college kept LeMoyne's Walker Avenue campus and its 1862 founding date. It was a practical rescue that became a permanent identity: two histories, one school, still rooted in South Memphis.
Coach Jerry C. Johnson's men's basketball team won the NCAA Division III national championship in 1975 — and to this day LeMoyne-Owen remains the only HBCU ever to win a national title at that level. It is also the only men's college basketball program in Tennessee, and the only sports program in the city of Memphis, ever to win an NCAA championship. Johnson, who arrived in 1958, had learned the game from Hall of Famer John McClendon — who had learned it directly from James Naismith, the inventor of basketball. The title wasn't a fluke; it was the crown of a program built the right way.
By 2007 the college was in serious trouble: the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools placed it on two years' probation over management and accreditation problems rooted in a lack of money. In August 2007 the City of Memphis pledged $3 million in taxpayer funds — controversially — to make sure the college could open for the fall semester, joined by pledges from the United Negro College Fund, Cummins, Tom Joyner, and the United Church of Christ. President Johnnie B. Watson fought the school back to reaffirmed accreditation and rebuilt the endowment to $20 million by 2014. It was the closest the college had come to closing since the riots of 1866.
LeMoyne-Owen marked its 150th anniversary in 2012 with a historical prelude production, 'Epic Celebration,' staged at Memphis's Cannon Center by Dr. Denita Hedgeman with local artists, musicians, actors, and dancers. The next year the college opened a $13.5 million, 336-bed residence hall — its first major campus construction in more than 40 years — and enrollment had doubled from its 2006 low of 500 students. The Tom Joyner Foundation had named LOC its July 2012 School of the Month, beaming the school's story to eight million radio listeners a week. For a school that nearly closed five years earlier, the sesquicentennial felt like a second founding.
In 2019 the National Security Agency designated LeMoyne-Owen's Information Assurance and Cyber Defense program a Center of Academic Excellence in Cyber Defense — the only HBCU-based NSA CAE program in the state of Tennessee. The program lives in Gibson-Orgill Hall, where the computer science division had been graduating classes since 1986. A brand-new BS in Cybersecurity was later approved, effective fall 2024. For a school of under a thousand students, landing an NSA designation put LOC on a national map that has nothing to do with athletics.
In July 2020 the Community Foundation of Greater Memphis pledged $40 million to LeMoyne-Owen — the largest donation in the college's history, quadrupling the endowment from $12 million to $52 million. The foundation will pay out roughly $2 million a year, giving the college its first real long-term financial footing in decades. The president called the gift 'transformative' for everything the college does and can do. After a century and a half of scraping by, LOC suddenly had a war chest.
For fall 2023, President Vernell Bennett-Fairs expanded the college's long-running music program into a marching band as a credit-bearing course, with ambitions of building a full instrumental major. The 'Majestic Sounds of the South' took to Memphis streets — the Whitehaven Christmas Parade, the city's 901 Day celebration, and Mardi Gras parades — and band-culture media like BougeeTV reacted with genuine surprise that little LeMoyne-Owen had a band at all. The college also began seeking National Association of Schools of Music accreditation and planned a music studio with faculty including assistant professor Ashley Davis. A school with no football team was building a marching band anyway — for the culture.
During 2024 Homecoming Weekend, between the women's and men's basketball games on October 26, LeMoyne-Owen unveiled its first-ever mascot: Walker the Magician, named for Walker Avenue, under the homecoming theme 'Not Like Us.' Interim president Christopher B. Davis reported a 15 percent enrollment increase and declared the college 'on the cusp of a resurgence.' The weekend's block party, step show, and tailgate on Brownlee Lawn felt like a school deciding, loudly, that it intended to be here for another 160 years. In 2026 the college hired former Memphis Tigers assistant Faragi Phillips — who had helped coach the upset of No. 1 Houston in 2023 — as head men's basketball coach to chase the program's next era.
Jackson's Lane College is LOC's natural in-state HBCU rival in the SIAC, and the basketball meetings are wars: the Magicians swept the 2025–26 conference set, 69-64 at home in January and 77-61 in February. Two small Tennessee church-founded schools fighting over the same recruits and the same conference standing. Every meeting carries the weight of the whole state's Black-college pecking order.
Not a conference rivalry but a Memphis tradition: the Tigers host the Magicians in preseason exhibitions at FedExForum, where LOC routinely hangs around longer than expected — down one at 14-13 five minutes into the 2017 meeting. Memphis leads the exhibition series 7-0 through 2017, and Penny Hardaway's first game as Tigers head coach was the 2018 exhibition against LOC (120-66). For Magicians players, it's the biggest stage they'll ever play on, five minutes from campus.
The Lady Magicians' signature recent win came against Clark Atlanta: a 59-48 road victory in January 2018 that handed the unbeaten Lady Panthers their first SIAC loss and lifted LOC to second in the SIAC West. For a program that has scrapped near the bottom of the standings, beating an undefeated CAU on the road was the kind of result that lives in the locker room for years.
🥁 Majestic Sounds of the South Marching Band · since 2023
The band is brand-new — launched as a credit-bearing marching course in fall 2023 after decades of the college having only a concert/choral music program. It has already marched the Whitehaven Christmas Parade, Memphis's 901 Day, and the 2026 Mardi Gras Memphis and Krewe of Morephus parades, and its 2026 'Welcome to Egypt' battle-of-the-bands floor show was shot in 4K by A1 Media. Band-culture channel BougeeTV's stunned reaction video — 'When Did This Happen?!' — says everything about how fast this program appeared. Remarkably, LOC has no football team; the band exists for parades, battles, and pride.
Assistant professor of music with Stax Academy ties, brought in as the college expanded the band into a credit-bearing course and pursued NASM accreditation.
The college created a tenure-track Director of Marching Band / Assistant Professor of Music post to run the marching and pep bands; named holder unverified.
Two Memphis Greek institutions are verified on the national rolls: Delta Sigma Theta's Alpha Upsilon (1934) and Zeta Phi Beta's Pi Alpha (1939). A 1992 Delta's memoir describes pledging Alpha Upsilon after years when 'LeMoyne Owen College did not have a line' — a reminder that small-campus chapters cycle through quiet years. Homecoming programming centers on basketball, the step show, and the block party; the full chapter roster beyond these two was not verified.
Still digging this up — check back soon.
Designed by Tandy & Foster and erected the year the college moved to Walker Avenue, Steele Hall is the oldest building on campus. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1979, decades before the rest of the district.
Architect George Awsumb's two Colonial Revival halls and the landscaped quadrangle lawn gave the campus its permanent face. Brownlee anchors the quad's south side; Sweeney began life as the president's home. Both are contributing buildings in the 2005 National Register historic district.
The three-story Modernist library by Gassner-Nathan-Browne, named for the 1943–1970 president, gave the college its first real academic library during the civil rights era.
Built by Gassner-Nathan-Browne as the campus student union; the firm also designed the Gibson-Orgill Science-Mathematics Learning Center. Exact construction year unverified in sources opened, so the date is approximate.
The Computer Science Division in Gibson-Orgill Hall graduated its first class in 1986 and later cultivated what the college calls its first African American cohort of IT elites — the seed of the NSA cyber-defense designation that followed.
The LeMoyne College Historic District — four contributing buildings (Steele, Brownlee, Sweeney, the Price Library) and the 1936 quadrangle — was listed on the National Register of Historic Places, formalizing the campus's architectural story.
The college's first major construction in more than 40 years: a 336-bed dorm that let LOC house students on campus at scale for the first time in a generation. Enrollment had already doubled from its 2006 low of 500.
The NSA designated LOC's Information Assurance and Cyber Defense program a CAE-CD — the only HBCU-based NSA center of excellence in Tennessee — and a new BS in Cybersecurity was approved for fall 2024.
The largest gift in school history quadrupled the endowment from $12 million to $52 million, paying out about $2 million a year — the financial foundation for every future capital project.
Interim president Christopher Davis rolled out a brand revamp — the college now bills itself as 'The Source' — alongside a 15% enrollment jump, the Walker the Magician mascot debut, and plans for a music studio supporting the new marching band.
Small-college staffing with outsized names: an NBA veteran (Bonzi Wells) previously held the men's basketball job, and former NBA head coach Lionel Hollins has served as an assistant. The athletic department punches above its enrollment in coaching pedigree.
Former Memphis Tigers assistant under Penny Hardaway who helped coach the 2023 upset of No. 1 Houston; as a Mississippi Valley State standout he led the Delta Devils to the 1996 NCAA Tournament. Hired to rebuild Magicians basketball.
The legend: 821 wins over 46 seasons, the 1975 NCAA Division III title, eight future NBA players coached, plus duties coaching swimming and track and teaching health and PE. He died in 2021 at age 102; Rep. Steve Cohen eulogized him on the House floor.
Brought in with the 2023 band expansion; Stax Academy connections are meant to plug students into Memphis's real music industry.
Carries the alumni story — Marion Barry to Benjamin Hooks — and sat on the 'Past, Present & Future' panel on the college's 160-year history.
Taught at his alma mater and became Rhodes College's first Black professor; remembered in a 2026 JBHE memoriam.
Life at LOC is intimate and South Memphis to the bone: roughly 650–750 students, 98 percent Black, two-thirds women, most of them from Memphis itself. The campus sits in the Soulsville district, minutes from Beale Street and the Stax Museum, and the college's own Community Development Corporation has spent years helping rebuild the surrounding neighborhood. There is no football, so fall energy flows into the band, the step show, and Magicians basketball at Bruce/Johnson Hall.