Fairfield, Alabama · Founded 1898 · Golden Bears
“The little Birmingham-area HBCU named for an enslaved bishop that survived the Depression, armed the civil-rights movement with students, and now fields a band and a football program that win national awards.”
PMM performing Gladys Knight and the Pips' 'Neither One Of Us' at the 2025 Columbus Battle of the Bands in 4K.
PMM's championship-winning field show at the 2025 Red Lobster Band of the Year competition, the year after their first ESPN Band of the Year title.
Full field show from the back-to-back ESPN Division II Band of the Year champions.
PMM taking 1st place in the Battle of the Bands at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, 2026.
PMM's pep rally performance at the 2026 Circle City Classic in Indianapolis.
PMM marching in before the Clark Atlanta matchup, fall 2026 — the band's game-day presence.
PMM's 2016 tribute to Atlanta rapper Shawty Lo at the Southern Region Battle of the Bands in Birmingham, arranged and directed by Brian Nalls.
PMM performing Dreezy's 'Close To You' at the 2016 Turkey Day Classic.
PMM in the Circle City Classic parade in Indianapolis, 2022.
The Golden Stars danceline's homecoming field show, shot from two angles.
The 2026 Golden Stars danceline reveal on their official channel.
The 2025 Golden Stars danceline reveal.
First African-American mayor of Birmingham (1979–1999); Miles graduate and former dean who called the college 'an awakening to community responsibility.'
First African-American federal judge in Alabama, appointed to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama.
First African American to attend the University of Alabama (1956); attended Miles College before enrolling at UA.
Civil-rights activist who fought alongside Autherine Lucy in the battle to integrate the University of Alabama.
Politician and former member of the Alabama House of Representatives.
Member of the Alabama House of Representatives.
Former Democratic U.S. Representative from Illinois.
Politician serving in the New Jersey General Assembly since 2008.
50th Bishop of the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church and vice chair of the Miles College Board of Trustees.
Former NBA player.
American football player.
Leaders of the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church in Alabama began organizing for a college of their own in 1893, a generation after the CME denomination split from the white-dominated Methodist Episcopal Church, South in 1870. At the time, Alabama's CME community had only two conferences — the Alabama and North Alabama conferences — and each tried to build its own school, one at Thomasville and one elsewhere. The duplication was unsustainable, and the two efforts eventually consolidated into a single institution. That consolidated school would take the name of the church's founding bishop.
The college was founded in 1898 and chartered as Miles Memorial College in honor of Bishop William H. Miles, a founding bishop of the CME Church who had been born enslaved in Kentucky and rose to lead one of the largest Black denominations in the South before his death in 1892. It was established to educate African American young people at a time when the state provided almost nothing for Black higher education. The school is still supported by and affiliated with the CME Church today, though its students and faculty represent many denominations. The founding date makes Miles one of the older surviving Black colleges in Alabama.
Miles Memorial College was chartered by the State of Alabama in 1905 as a degree-granting institution, formalizing its standing after years of operating as a church school. The charter gave the young college legal footing to award degrees as it moved beyond its early grammar-school roots. Early on it had been housed in the former Booker City High School campus at Booker City, Alabama, operating out of borrowed space while church leaders looked for a permanent home.
In the spring of 1907 the college moved from Booker City to its present campus in Fairfield, Alabama, about six miles west of downtown Birmingham, trading borrowed quarters for land of its own. The first building completed on the new campus was Williams Hall, named for Bishop R. R. Williams, the presiding CME bishop in Alabama. Williams Hall served over the decades as the administration building, the women's dormitory, and the home of the economics classes. It stands today closed and awaiting renovation, but it anchors the historic core of the campus.
In 1911 Miles awarded its first bachelor's degrees, crossing the line from a church school with college ambitions to a real degree-granting college. The milestone came just four years after the move to Fairfield, when the campus was still little more than Williams Hall and raw ambition. Among its early graduates was Mrs. Willie Selden McDaniel, who received a bachelor's degree in education in May 1918, remembered as one of the college's first college graduates. For Black students in the Jim Crow South, a Miles degree was one of the few legitimate tickets into the professions.
William Augustus Bell began his second, long term as president in 1936, and under his leadership Miles survived the Great Depression — the period when dozens of small Black colleges across the South closed for good. Bell had already served a brief first term in 1912–1913 before returning to hold the presidency for 25 years, through 1961. Keeping a tuition-dependent Black college alive through the Depression took relentless fundraising and frugality, and the school credits Bell with simply refusing to let it die. His quarter-century run gave Miles the stability to grow after the war.
In 1941 the trustees voted to drop 'Memorial' from the name, and Miles Memorial College became Miles College. The change was small on paper but marked the institution's arrival as a full-fledged college in its own right rather than a memorial project. By then it had been operating in Fairfield for more than three decades and had survived the Depression intact. The new name is the one every Golden Bear has carried since.
In 1949 Mr. Iva 'Bossman' Williams, an Alabama A&M graduate, started the Miles College band program with thirty-five members. It was a full musical operation from the start: a marching band for football games and parades, the Collegians dance band for social events, and a concert band for campus concerts. Williams led the program until his retirement in 1970. That 1949 beginning is the root of the Purple Marching Machine that marches today.
In 1961 Miles hired 46-year-old Lucius Pitts, then president of the Georgia Negro Teachers Association, at a salary of $7,500, and his decade transformed the college. He launched a 'tin can drive' to raise small donations for library books — when Bull Connor threatened to arrest students for panhandling, the story went national and books poured in from around the country, including more than 6,000 collected by Yale students. By 1963 enrollment was 810, tuition was $420 a year, and Pitts had grown the endowment from $75,000 to $500,000. He also secured a federal loan to build a $433,000 student union and cafeteria.
Under Pitts, Miles became one of the engines of the Birmingham civil-rights movement rather than a bystander to it. Miles students led sit-ins, registered voters, and in 1962 Pitts himself initiated a boycott of downtown white businesses to force desegregation of drinking fountains, elevators, and lunch counters and the hiring of Black clerks. The students' early-sixties boycott was a newsmaking action that forced downtown businesses to integrate their facilities. Pitts, a committed nonviolence man, also served on the 1963 Central Committee of movement organizers that met at the A.G. Gaston Motel during the SCLC's Birmingham campaign. Miles had previously held its students back from activism; Pitts opened the gates.
National press about Miles's struggles inspired John U. Monro, the dean of Harvard College, to volunteer his time to teach a summer English program at Miles in 1964, and eleven other white faculty members signed on that year. In 1967 Pitts went further and persuaded Monro to resign the Harvard deanship outright to join Miles as director of freshman studies, a hire that made national headlines. A Harvard Crimson profile later called Miles 'the only four-year college within 50 miles of Birmingham that admitted blacks' and noted the college had secured grants to pioneer Alabama's first voter-education projects, VISTA, Head Start centers, and the Manpower training project. Monro served at Miles until 1978.
After Pitts stabilized the college's finances — doubling enrollment to 1,200 and growing the budget — Miles was able to apply for accreditation through the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools' Commission on Colleges in 1969. Accreditation was the difference between a respected college and a school whose credits died at its doorstep. The college is accredited by SACS for baccalaureate degrees today and is one of a small group of schools nationally with a Center of Academic Excellence under the Director of National Intelligence. What the tin-can drive started, the accreditation finished: Miles was a real college, on paper and in fact.
In 1975 the college administration discontinued the football program, and the band went dark with it. Joe Terrell had directed the band from 1970 to 1975, but when football ended, the band program that Williams had built in 1949 was shuttered. It stayed dormant for more than twenty years — a generation of Miles students never heard a halftime show. The football program was later reinstated, but the band remained silent until 1996.
The Miles Memorial College Historic District was added to the U.S. National Register of Historic Places on January 3, 1994 (reference #93001031), having been designated an Alabama Register of Landmarks and Heritage site on March 19, 1993. The 76-acre district covers the historic core of the Fairfield campus — the Williams Hall-era buildings in Bungalow/Craftsman and Beaux Arts styles laid out by architects Tisdale, Stone & Patton. The listing recognizes the campus itself as a landmark of Black educational history in Alabama. Part of the working campus students walk every day is federally recognized history.
In July 1996 Arthur Means Jr., a high-school band director with thirty-seven years of experience, arrived to rebuild a band that had been silent for two decades — and had it ready for the first football game that August. He started with 32 students in purple sweatsuits and built them into a 200-strong unit. That same year the reborn band performed for President Bill Clinton's campaign rally at Birmingham-Southern. The Theta Sigma chapter of Tau Beta Sigma, the band service sorority, was chartered at Miles on April 5, 1998. Means's rebuild is one of the great comebacks in HBCU band history.
The Purple Marching Machine marched in the 76th Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade in 2002, the national-stage moment that announced the band's rebirth to the country. A band that had been 32 kids in sweatsuits six years earlier was now marching down Broadway on live television. The Macy's appearance became the program's signature proof of how far the rebuild had come. It set the tone for everything PMM has done since — national stages, national competitions, national trophies.
In 2006 Miles purchased the former Lloyd Noland Hospital from HealthSouth, creating a 41-acre 'north campus' alongside the original 35 acres and more than doubling the footprint of the college. The acquisition was the biggest physical expansion in the school's history and opened the door to everything built since. The college has eyed acquiring the Demetrius C. Newton Gardens apartments between the two parcels to connect them. President George T. French Jr., who took office in this era, pushed the growth agenda that turned the hospital grounds into campus.
On November 12, 2011, eighty-three years after fielding its first football team, Miles won its first Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Conference championship, stunning Albany State 20-17 in the league's first championship game at Clark Atlanta's Panther Stadium. Patton Chambers's 29-yard field goal knuckled through with nine seconds left to beat an Albany State team chasing its seventh straight playoff bid. It was the first time since 2000 that neither Albany State nor Tuskegee won the SIAC. First-year coach Reginald Ruffin was named SIAC Coach of the Year, and the governor of Alabama issued a formal proclamation honoring the Golden Bears.
Miles broke ground in October 2012 on a $20 million construction project — the largest building campaign in school history — adding a 240-bed residence hall, a student activity and dining center, and a welcome and admissions center. The project also restored the pedestrian entranceway with grants from Home Depot and Energen. Plans for the north campus included a school of international studies, a health and wellness center, and a performing arts center. After a century of making do, Miles was finally building for the enrollment it wanted instead of the one it had.
Miles closed out the decade by becoming the first team in the SIAC Championship Game era (since 2011) to win consecutive league titles, beating Albany State 21-6 in 2019 after a 50-23 title-game rout in 2018. The 2018 run included a 31-27 comeback win over rival Tuskegee that clinched the title-game berth. The Golden Bears finished the decade with four championships in nine years — three since 2015 — plus five Western Division crowns. The program Reginald Ruffin had inherited at 3-8 in 2010 was now the team the rest of the SIAC measured itself against.
In August 2019 the board named Bobbie Knight interim president — the first woman to lead Miles College in its 121-year history — and confirmed her as president on March 5, 2020, succeeding George T. French Jr. Knight had been a corporate executive before moving into higher education, and her arrival marked a turn toward aggressive modernization and fundraising. Within months she landed the largest single gift in school history. Her six-year tenure has been defined by new graduate programs, tech partnerships, and a national profile Miles had never carried before.
In January 2020 NBA Hall of Famer Charles Barkley, an Alabama native from nearby Leeds, donated $1 million to Miles College — the largest single-person donation the school had ever received. Barkley called Knight personally to tell her, saying he wanted to help the first female president succeed, and hoped the money would fund academic scholarships with no strings attached. Knight used the gift to kickstart a campaign to raise $100 million for the college. It was the fourth $1 million HBCU gift from Barkley, who had previously given to Alabama A&M, Clark Atlanta, and Morehouse.
In July 2021 Miles used CARES Act and Higher Education Emergency Relief funds to clear $2.1 million in outstanding account balances for currently enrolled students, plus $1.6 million for pandemic support resources. That fall the college announced it would also cancel $3.9 million in federally backed student loans for current students. For a school where most students are Pell-eligible, wiping balances clean mid-pandemic was a lifeline, not a gesture. The move drew national attention as an example of HBCUs turning federal relief into direct student relief.
The fall of 2024 was the greatest season in Miles athletics history: the football team went 9-2 with nine straight wins, beat Clark Atlanta 53-25 for the program's fifth SIAC title of the Division II era, and won the school's first-ever NCAA playoff game, 14-13 over Carson-Newman at home, before falling to Valdosta State 33-17. The defense led the nation in forced turnovers. The same year, the Purple Marching Machine was named ESPN's Division II Band of the Year — collecting a $75,000 prize — after showcases at the National Battle of the Bands in 2018, 2019, and 2024. The band repeated as back-to-back Band of the Year champions in 2025.
In January 2025 Miles named former Alabama and Indianapolis Colts defensive back Chris Goode as head football coach, replacing Sam Shade, who left for Alabama A&M after the historic 2024 season. Goode, hired out of his Goode Elite Prep academy, inherited a rebuilt roster and the job of defending the SIAC crown. Meanwhile President Knight has pushed Miles into an unlikely national role: the college launched its first-ever Master of Management program, became the only HBCU to fully integrate the NVIDIA Spark AI platform, created the 2150 Center for Innovation, Commercialization & Growth, and signed an MOU with Kemet Productions for AI and augmented-reality production opportunities. In 2026 Knight was the sole HBCU president on a Milken Institute Global Conference panel — the school's $69.3 million in annual regional economic impact now anchors Fairfield, the city's largest employer through six years of municipal bankruptcy.
The defining rivalry: first played in 1929 (Tuskegee won 39-0), now 65+ meetings deep, with Tuskegee leading the series 48-17-1 as of 2023. The game has routinely decided the SIAC West Division — over one nine-season stretch it determined the division winner eight times and the conference title seven. The 2018 meeting was a classic: Miles stormed back from 24-7 down to win 31-27 and clinch a title-game berth. Adding fuel, Reginald Ruffin — the coach who built Miles into a champion — left to become Tuskegee's athletic director in December 2021.
Miles's first SIAC championship came at Albany State's expense: the 20-17 upset in the league's first title game in 2011, on Patton Chambers's last-second field goal, which ended Albany State's bid for a seventh straight playoff trip. The Golden Bears beat the Golden Rams again for the 2018 title, 50-23, in Fairfield, and again 21-6 in the 2019 championship. Albany State had not lost to Miles since 2002 before the 2011 stunner — which is exactly why the rivalry has teeth.
🥁 Purple Marching Machine · since 1949
The Purple Marching Machine's signature is the comeback: silent from 1975 to 1996, rebuilt by Arthur Means Jr. from 32 kids to 200 members, marched in the 76th Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade in 2002, and under Willie Snipes Jr. became ESPN's Division II Band of the Year in 2024 — a $75,000 prize — and repeated in 2025. PMM includes the 24 Karat Percussion Section drumline, marches with the Golden Stars danceline and the Steaming Flags color guard, and plays to more than 100,000 people a year.
Alabama A&M graduate who founded the band with 35 members — marching band, the Collegians dance band, and concert band. Bhamwiki's band history lists him as 'Ika Williams, 1950.'
Carried the program after Williams retired until the college discontinued football in 1975, when the band went dormant.
More than twenty years of silence. Football was later reinstated but the band stayed dark until 1996.
Retired Carver High School director who rebuilt the program from 32 students in purple sweatsuits to a 200-strong unit ready for the first football game six weeks after he arrived. Took PMM to Clinton's 1996 campaign rally and the 2002 Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.
Credited as arranger and director on PMM's 2016 performances, including the Shawty Lo tribute at the Southern Region Battle of the Bands and the Turkey Day Classic; full tenure not confirmed in sources checked.
Leads the band through its award-winning era: National Battle of the Bands showcases in 2018, 2019, and 2024, and ESPN Division II Band of the Year 2024 (repeated 2025).
Miles hosts eight of the nine NPHC organizations (no Iota Phi Theta chapter in the catalog listings), coordinated alongside NPHC per the college's 2025-2026 catalog. Local multicultural orgs (Nasiha Roho Adinasi, Uzuri Weusi Malkia, Rho Nu Tau, Lambda Psi Gamma) give the yard a distinctive homegrown flavor. The band-greek thread is real: Tau Beta Sigma's Theta Sigma chapter (chartered April 5, 1998) grew directly out of the 1996 Miles band revival.
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Williams Hall was the first building completed on the Fairfield campus after the 1907 move, named for Bishop R. R. Williams, the presiding CME bishop in Alabama. It served as the administration building, the women's dormitory, and the home of economics classes. It is currently closed and awaiting renovation.
President Lucius Pitts secured a federal loan to finance construction of a $433,000 student union and cafeteria — the first major new student-life building of the modern era, built as enrollment pushed toward 810.
The Miles Memorial College Historic District joined the National Register of Historic Places (January 3, 1994), recognizing the 76-acre historic core — Williams Hall-era Bungalow/Craftsman and Beaux Arts buildings — as a landmark of Black educational history.
Miles bought the former Lloyd Noland Hospital from HealthSouth, adding a 41-acre north campus to the original 35 acres. It remains the largest physical expansion in school history and the site of all subsequent growth.
The college launched its own radio station, WMWI FM 88.7, licensed to serve Demopolis, Alabama. It broadcast for a decade before going silent in 2019, with its license cancelled in December 2023.
Ground was broken on the biggest building campaign in school history: a 240-bed residence hall, a new student activity and dining center, and a new welcome and admissions center. The pedestrian entranceway was restored with grants from Home Depot and Energen.
The stadium named for 13th president Albert J. H. Sloan II was upgraded with a $1 million Environ-Turf field, giving the Golden Bears a modern home surface for the championship era.
Charles Barkley's $1 million donation — the largest single gift in school history — kicked off President Knight's comprehensive campaign to raise $100 million for the college.
CARES Act and HEERF funds wiped $2.1 million in student account balances and funded $1.6 million in pandemic support; the college then cancelled $3.9 million in federally backed student loans for current students.
Miles added graduate programs in sports management and religious studies plus undergraduate minors in sports management and AI, and created the 2150 Center for Innovation, Commercialization & Growth business incubator under chief innovation officer Chuck Faush. The college became the only HBCU fully integrated with the NVIDIA Spark AI platform.
Reginald Ruffin coached Miles football 2011–2021 (first SIAC title, SIAC Coach of the Year 2011) before becoming Tuskegee's athletic director; Sam Shade coached 2022–2024 (the 2024 title and first playoff win) before leaving for Alabama A&M. John U. Monro, former dean of Harvard College, served as director of freshman studies from 1967 to 1978 — one of the most famous faculty hires in HBCU history.
First female president (2020); former corporate executive driving the AI and graduate-program push.
Athletic director through the championship era; announced the Chris Goode hire in January 2025.
Former Alabama standout and Indianapolis Colts defensive back (1987–1993); named head coach January 2025 after Sam Shade left for Alabama A&M. Runs Goode Elite Prep academy.
Leads the Purple Marching Machine; ESPN Division II Band of the Year 2024.
Heads the 2150 Center for Innovation, Commercialization & Growth.
Miles is a small, tight campus in Fairfield where the band and the football team carry the culture. Homecoming is a city event — the parade rolls through downtown Fairfield, not just the quad — and the 2026 homecoming drew the Rickey Smiley Morning Show to broadcast live from Pearson Hall Auditorium. With roughly 1,200 students, everybody knows the band members by name, and the Purple Marching Machine's award seasons double as campus-wide celebrations.