Augusta, Georgia · Founded 1882 · Lions
“A 300-student Augusta college built by Black and white Methodists together in 1882 — and still standing after everything the last 140 years threw at it.”
The 2010 homecoming concert — TK-N-Cash, Gorilla Zoe, Rich Kids and more — captures what Paine homecoming felt like in the school's ~900-student era, before the accreditation crisis.
Construction footage of the multi-million-dollar HEAL Complex, the biggest capital project of the Bradley era, which replaced the Randall-Carter Gymnasium.
Fan footage of Paine vs. Edward Waters on October 18, 2014 — the homecoming game where the Lions won 38-14, their first football victory since 1962.
WRDW local-news report on the end of the accreditation war — after years of financial struggle, Paine announces it is moving forward.
The December 2020 virtual commencement where golf legend Lee Elder, the first Black man to play the Masters (1975), received an honorary doctorate from Paine.
The full 2021 virtual commencement — the COVID-era ceremony in the year CeeLo Green joined as artist in residence.
McCorn's formal investiture in the historic Gilbert-Lambuth Memorial Chapel in September 2025.
The 2025 commencement with U.S. Senator Raphael Warnock delivering the address and receiving an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters.
The 2026 commencement with the address given by Michael L. Thurmond '75 — Paine alumnus, former Georgia Labor Commissioner, and board chair.
Paine College Day 2026 service at Williams Memorial CME Church on 15th Street, with President McCorn speaking — the living link between the college and its founding denomination.
Class of 1886 — Paine's first graduate, first Black faculty member, and widely recognized as the first African-American archaeologist; earned an advanced degree at Brown and served as a missionary to the Congo.
Class of 1902 — civil rights leader, member of the President's Committee on Civil Rights, and an alternate U.S. representative to the United Nations.
Class of 1906 — president of Miles College in Alabama for two terms.
Class of 1937 — novelist and film writer; the first Black author in the United States to write a best-selling novel.
Class of 1941 — Paine's first Black president (1971–1974), named for the founding bishop.
Class of 1942 — journalist and author; the first African American to appear on television as a newsman.
Class of 1953 — mayor of Keysville, Georgia (1985–2005); the second African American woman elected as a chief official in Georgia.
Class of 1953 — NASA consultant; the second African American to earn a Ph.D. in geology.
Class of 1954 — mathematician; the first African-American dean at MIT, where she led student affairs from 1980 to 1990 after enrolling in college at age 15.
Class of 1958 — bishop of the United Methodist Church.
Class of 1966 — president of five HBCUs: Paine, Texas Southern, Alabama State, Fort Valley State, and Texas College.
Class of 1975 — attorney; the first African American elected Georgia Labor Commissioner; now CEO of DeKalb County and chair of Paine's board of trustees.
Civil rights leader; president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (1977–1997), which he co-founded with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Senior Bishop of the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church — one of the two denominations that founded Paine.
Class of 1939 — director of the Shiloh Community Center and designer of the Paine College flag.
HBCU advocate who helped develop the federal Upward Bound program; past president of Clark College.
Class of 2002 — recipient of the Herbert W. Nickens Award.
Augusta rapper behind the crunk-era anthems of the early 2000s.
Bishop Lucius Henry Holsey of the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church began sketching the idea for a school that would train Black preachers and teachers for the communities emerging from slavery. He said it plainly: establish a school to train Negro teachers and preachers so they could meet the educational and spiritual needs of a people newly freed. He spent more than a decade trying to raise money for it on his own before deciding to ask the white church for help — a bold move in 1880s Georgia.
The Methodist Episcopal Church, South appointed a commission of clergy and laypeople to cooperate with the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church in founding an educational institute. Leaders like Warren Akin Candler and Atticus G. Haygood lent their names and their church's money to a school for Black students. In 1882 each church named three men to a joint committee — six members, three Black and three white — which became the first board of trustees. The Augusta Chronicle would later call that board the oldest interracial body in the nation.
The board met November 1, 1882 and founded the school, naming it Paine Institute in honor of the late Bishop Robert Paine of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South — the man who had helped organize the CME Church in 1870. Within a month they elected Dr. Morgan Callaway, vice-president of Emory College, as the first president. They also expanded the board from six members to nineteen, recruiting from outside Georgia so they could raise real money.
The Reverend Moses U. Paine of Missouri offered an endowment of $25,000 — the institute's first major gift. It was the kind of money that turned an idea into a going concern. The first cash the school ever collected, though, was far humbler: $7.15 from the Virginia Conference of the CME Church and $8.85 from the South Georgia Conference. A Georgia Historical Society marker notes the school was founded with pennies collected from former slaves, among other donations.
In January 1884 the first classes met in rented rooms above Claussen's Bakery at 10th and Broad Street in downtown Augusta. About thirty students showed up for the first term; by the second semester there were seventy. The school offered everything from elementary lessons to college work, because in 1880s Augusta there was nowhere else for Black students to learn.
The institute bought a ten-acre site on 15th Street — then farmland outside of town, now the heart of Augusta — and moved there in 1886. It held its first graduation ceremony that same year. The founders were explicit that Paine would not be a clergy-only school: it would give Black youth of both genders a real liberal arts education, not just job training.
Paine's first graduate was John Wesley Gilbert, class of 1886, who went on to Brown University and the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, Greece. He became the first African American to receive an advanced degree from Brown, the first Black faculty member at Paine (1888), and is widely recognized as the first African-American archaeologist — he did fieldwork in Greece and later served as a Methodist missionary to the Congo. After local Black residents questioned why an all-white faculty was teaching Black students, the trustees voted to integrate the faculty, and Gilbert led the way.
Paine Institute was rechartered as Paine College in 1903, sharpening its focus on collegiate-level classes. While many Black schools were adopting Booker T. Washington's industrial-education model — masonry, carpentry, trade skills — Paine held to the liberal arts. The school kept running a high school department too, since Augusta still had no public high school for Black students, and would keep it until 1945.
The Women's Missionary Council of the MECS opened a Bethlehem Community Center in Augusta — the inaugural one in a Southern network — specifically because Paine College was there. The center gave low-income Black families athletic facilities, classes, and social services. During the 1930s and 1940s it housed several of Paine's academic departments plus a gymnasium students used daily. It was an early example of the college anchoring the whole neighborhood, not just the campus.
In 1934 Paine began hosting an annual interracial student conference on socioreligious questions, co-sponsored by the Candler School of Theology at Emory University. White and Black students lived together and shared every facility on campus — nearly unheard-of in Jim Crow Georgia. A few years earlier, the MECS had started an annual leadership training school at Paine with a biracial staff, including civil rights advocate Dorothy Rogers Tilly, who served on its staff from 1929 onward. Paine's campus was one of the only places in the state where the races learned and worked side by side.
From 1938 to 1941 the Paine Lions football team compiled a 16-4-1 record — the high-water mark in school history. Those were the teams the old-timers remembered when football came back decades later. The program would fall on hard times fast: starting in 1955, Paine lost 36 straight games, a streak that ended three games shy of the national record of the day. The spell finally broke with an 8-0 win over Livingstone College in 1962.
Paine stopped functioning as a secondary school in 1945, when Augusta opened its first public high school for African Americans. For more than sixty years the college had been the only classroom option for Black teenagers in the city — it discontinued its elementary program around the 1920s but had kept the high school going out of necessity. From here on, Paine was a college, full stop.
In early 1960 the Paine College Steering Committee — student leaders from campus organizations — began coordinating sit-ins, marches, and pray-ins to desegregate Augusta's buses, restaurants, and businesses, and even the Augusta National Golf Club, home of the Masters. One group of students filed a lawsuit in 1960 against the city and the bus company over segregated seating. In 1962 a panel of three federal judges ruled the segregation rules unconstitutional. Paine students were in the streets and in the courtroom at the same time.
The football program was dropped after the 1963 season — the 1962 win over Livingstone turned out to be the program's last victory for half a century. With the team gone, Saturdays at Paine became quieter; basketball became the heartbeat of Lion athletics. Nobody at the time knew the Lions would not field a team again until 2014.
A mysterious fire gutted Haygood Hall, which held the administrative offices, classrooms, and meeting space — and destroyed a rare, treasured collection of African artifacts. It took nearly a decade to recover: the building was reconstructed and, in 1977–78, reopened as Haygood-Holsey Hall, named for both the Methodist patron and the founding bishop. In the same year, 1968, the Gilbert-Lambuth Memorial Chapel was completed — a 1,200-seat cruciform chapel designed by Augusta architects Kuhlke and Wade that became the campus's spiritual center.
Lucius H. Pitts, a member of Paine's class of 1941, became the college's first Black president in 1971 — eighty-nine years after the school's founding. His tenure was cut short: he died in his office in February 1974 at age 59, a loss the New York Times noted in an obituary. Julius Samuel Scott Jr. succeeded him in 1975 and spent his first term rebuilding frayed relations between Paine and Augusta's white community — a bridge the founders would have recognized.
Paine joined the Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Conference for the 1985–86 school year, competing at the NCAA Division II level alongside schools like Morehouse, Clark Atlanta, Tuskegee, and Benedict. The Lions stayed in the SIAC for 35 years, through 2020–21. Basketball, baseball, track, cross country, golf, softball, and volleyball became the program's year-round core.
Shirley A. R. Lewis became Paine's first female president in 1994 and served thirteen years, until 2007. Her tenure ended with her election as President Emeritus in 2011 — a title later also given to Julius Scott. It was under Lewis that Paine posthumously honored Augusta's own Godfather of Soul: James Brown was awarded an honorary doctorate at the end of his 2006 memorial service, after plans to present it at the May commencement were overtaken by his Christmas Day death.
On December 26, 2012 a historic district of the campus was listed on the National Register of Historic Places, recognizing Paine's contributions to education and African-American heritage. That October the board of trustees had unanimously voted to bring football back after a 50-year hiatus. In 2013 the Lions played a limited club schedule under coach Greg Ruffin and went 3-1. Augusta was buzzing: after half a century, there would be real Lion football again.
The full program kicked off in fall 2014 with home games at Laney Stadium and went 2-8. The first win — 38-14 over Edward Waters on homecoming night, October 18, before 1,346 fans — was the program's first victory since 1962. The season closed with a 45-34 win over Benedict on November 8. Enrollment stood at 922 that year. It was a magical run, and it lasted exactly one season: in January 2015 interim president Samuel Sullivan announced the board had suspended football for two years to save the college's finances and accreditation. The team never came back.
In November 2015, after SACS recommended revoking accreditation, Paine launched the 'Build it Back Campaign' and raised over half a million dollars in six months — alumni, churches, and friends answering the call. By May the college had hit a $3.5 million fundraising goal, $2.5 million of it in cash, aimed at offsetting $5.4 million in debt. A month later, SACS recommended revocation anyway. Paine appealed to the accreditor, then to federal courts, and lost.
In June 2016 the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools voted to strip Paine's regional accreditation, citing financial resources, financial stability, and control of sponsored research funds. The school had been on warning since 2012 and probation since 2014, after the Augusta Chronicle reported lost federal loan eligibility, unreturned financial aid, and bounced financial-aid checks. Paine sued, won a preliminary injunction that kept accreditation in place during the case, and fought through the district court and the Eleventh Circuit — and lost both. Roughly 95 percent of Paine students depended on federal financial aid, so the stakes were existential.
Paine applied to the Transnational Association of Christian Colleges and Schools and was granted candidate status in 2018. TRACS, a national accreditor recognized by the U.S. Department of Education, became the college's lifeline: students at candidate institutions keep full federal financial-aid rights. The school that had spent a decade fighting SACS now had a new path forward — and a new president, Jerry L. Hardee, who had taken the job in 2017 saying he felt God telling him to do it.
In November 2020 TRACS advanced Paine from candidate status to full accreditation, ending the nearly decade-long accreditation war. The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education called it 'a dawn of a new day' for the college. That December, at a virtual commencement, Paine awarded golf legend Lee Elder — the first Black man to play the Masters, in 1975 — an honorary doctorate, with Dr. Cynthia Bond Hopson of the Black College Fund giving the keynote.
In fall 2021 Grammy winner CeeLo Green — Goodie Mob, Gnarls Barkley, 'Crazy,' The Voice — surprised a student assembly and signed on as Paine's Distinguished Artist in Residence. His job: recruit students, mentor them, and help rebuild the fabled Paine choir, which had once toured nationally. Green, who teaches an on-campus class monthly, said Augusta spoke to him: 'Every time I cross that line into Augusta, something comes alive for me.' Enrollment that fall was just 252 students; the choir revival became the school's most visible symbol of comeback.
Paine announced a $2.25 million National Park Service grant — believed to be its largest federal grant in about a decade — to restore three historic buildings: Epworth Residential Hall (1925), Belle-Bennett Residential Hall (1962), and the Peters Campus Center, plus ADA accessibility upgrades. Alumni championed it; board chair and Paine graduate Michael Thurmond and CME Bishop Thomas L. Brown Sr. toured the campus with potential partners. The grant anchored a new 10-year campaign to double enrollment from 344 students.
Hurricane Helene tore through Augusta in September 2024 and hammered the campus: the Gilbert-Lambuth Chapel's roof was badly damaged, its steeple splintered and stained-glass windows dislodged, eight buildings needed new roofs, ten residential properties needed extensive repair, and more than 75 percent of the large trees on campus were destroyed or uprooted. The baseball field was completely destroyed. The college launched a $4 million repair campaign, noting neither insurance nor FEMA would cover the full cost.
Rev. Dr. Lester A. McCorn took office as Paine's 18th president on January 1, 2025, and was formally invested that September in the Gilbert-Lambuth Chapel. A Morehouse man who pastored churches from Baltimore to Connecticut, McCorn had spent seven years transforming Clinton College in South Carolina — adding degrees, raising enrollment, and winning back accreditation. One of his first moves at Paine: eliminating outstanding institutional student debt so hundreds of former Lions could return and finish their degrees. Senator Raphael Warnock gave the 2025 commencement address, telling graduates to keep the activist spirit that Paine students carried into the streets in 1960.
The closest thing Paine has to a blood rivalry is Benedict, the fellow small SIAC school up the road in Columbia, South Carolina. The football history is unforgettable: Paine's 2014 revival season closed November 8, 2014 with a 45-34 win over Benedict — the program's second win, and, as it turned out, its last game ever. The schools have also met in the Greenville HBCU Classic baseball doubleheader at Fluor Field. With both programs fighting for the same recruits and the same headlines in the SIAC's South Carolina–Georgia corridor, every meeting carried weight.
Paine is 1-0 all-time against Edward Waters, and that single game is one of the most famous nights in school history: October 18, 2014, homecoming at Laney Stadium, a 38-14 win that ended a 52-year football victory drought dating to 1962. Isiah Jenkins, Ausin Beamus, and a pick-six by Jarod Richardso did the damage before 1,346 fans. A rivalry built on one game, but what a game.
A recurring SIAC basketball feud. In February 2014 Paine beat Morehouse 86-72 in Atlanta — the Lions' third straight win over the Maroon Tigers that season, with all five Paine starters in double figures. The 2014 football schedule also sent Paine to Morehouse (a 20-10 loss). Two small, proud, church-adjacent HBCUs with long memories, meeting in the SIAC year after year.
Not a marching-band director — Morehouse and Georgia State-trained professor of music who joined Paine in fall 2013 and rebuilt the choir from under 30 members back toward 40-plus, raising over $20,000 in a year for sheet music and travel. His stated goal: restore the program to its heyday of an 80-member choir, an orchestra, and full music degrees.
Paine's catalog lists eight nationally chartered Greek-letter fraternities and sororities — the Divine Nine minus one, Iota Phi Theta not present — coordinated by an NPHC council chapter. With enrollment around 300, Greek life is intimate rather than sprawling, but students describe it as a real presence on campus. The Mahogany Essence Dance Team and Sisters on a Mission round out the most visible student-performance and service groups. Full chapter names for the other six orgs were not verified — flagged, not padded.
Still digging this up — check back soon.
Dedicated October 30, 1956, this became the home of the biology, physics, and chemistry laboratories — a sign the college was serious about science education. It was completely renovated in the summer of 1994, gutting and rebuilding the lab spaces for a new generation of pre-med, dentistry, and pharmacy-track students.
Completed in 1968, the same year fire destroyed Haygood Hall, the chapel was designed by Augusta architects Kuhlke and Wade. Its cruciform nave seats 1,200 in air-conditioned comfort, and its rear wing houses the music program plus a 200-seat auditorium. A new sound system was installed in 2007. It has hosted everything from commencements to presidential investitures to the 2025 McCorn inauguration.
Completed in 1969 and named for longtime president Edmund Clarke Peters and his wife Ethel, the center houses the dining hall, the dean of student affairs, student government, the post office, the bookstore, and recreation areas. It is the daily gathering point of a small campus — and one of three buildings targeted for restoration under the 2022 federal campus grant.
Occupied in September 1977 and fully in use by 1978, the rebuilt administration building rose on the site of the 1968 fire — renamed to honor both Atticus Haygood, the white Methodist patron, and Bishop Lucius Holsey, the Black founder. It now holds administrative and faculty offices, classrooms, seminar rooms, and computer labs, carrying the interracial founding story in its very name.
Completed in 1918, Mary Helm Hall holds classrooms, faculty and administrative offices, and a computer lab. It got a major renovation in 1981 and a partial renovation in 2008, keeping one of the campus's oldest academic buildings in service for its second century.
Completed in 1947, the Candler Building served as the college library through spring 1991, when the Collins-Calloway Library opened. It now houses the Department of Education and the Office of Admission, with the Peters Museum and Candler Conference Center on the second floor. It was renovated in 2000 and again in 2018.
The multi-million-dollar Health Education Activities Learning (HEAL) Complex replaced the old Randall-Carter Gymnasium, funded by $2.5 million in SPLOST dollars plus private donations and friends-of-the-college gifts. With classrooms, laboratories, conference rooms, a weight room, film room, and a new 2,400-seat arena open to the community, it was the biggest capital project of the Bradley era — and became the home of Lion basketball.
On December 26, 2012 a historic district of the campus was listed on the National Register of Historic Places for its contributions to education and African-American heritage. The nomination notes the 1920s buildings by Nashville architects Tisdale, Stone and Pinson in Colonial and Classical Revival styles, plus later Kuhlke and Wade buildings — and the rare International Style Randall Carter Gymnasium, Graham Hall, and Peters Campus Center.
The National Park Service awarded Paine $2.25 million — its largest federal grant in about a decade — to restore Epworth Residential Hall (built 1925, suffering moisture and structural damage), Belle-Bennett Residential Hall (built 1962, interior restoration), and the Peters Campus Center, plus ADA accessibility across all three buildings. Board chair Michael Thurmond and CME Bishop Thomas L. Brown Sr. had personally walked the campus with potential partners to make the case.
After Hurricane Helene's September 2024 strike, the college launched a $4 million repair campaign: new roofs for the chapel and seven other buildings, stained-glass restoration, interior repairs to soaked rooms and equipment, replanting after the loss of over 75 percent of the campus's large trees, and rebuilding the completely destroyed baseball field. The work — funded by donations since insurance and FEMA would not cover everything — is the largest campus rebuild since the 1977 Haygood-Holsey reconstruction.
Paine runs lean: about 23 full-time faculty members for roughly 300 students (the AJC notes the college is trying to give those faculty more research support). Athletics is anchored at the HEAL Complex under the athletic director's office. Notable coaches have included Greg Ruffin, who led the 2013 club football team to a 3-1 record and the 2014 varsity return, and Olympic gold medalist Latasha Clark, hired as indoor track and field coach.
Took office January 1, 2025; invested September 2025. Former Clinton College president; Morehouse/Yale/Chicago Theological/United Theological educated.
Paine class of 1975; first African American elected Georgia Labor Commissioner; CEO of DeKalb County government. He personally challenged his network to fund the college's campaigns.
Augusta native and former Lady Lions basketball player (1994–95 season), appointed effective July 1, 2026, returning to her alma mater with two decades of coaching and administrative experience.
Led the fundraising push behind the HEAL Complex and the 'Growing Paine' campaign; the administrator who announced CeeLo Green's artist-in-residence role.
Morehouse and Georgia State trained; joined Paine in fall 2013 and rebuilt the choir from under 30 members back toward 40-plus, raising over $20,000 in a year for sheet music and travel.
With only about 300 students, Paine feels less like a university and more like a family that argues at dinner — everybody knows everybody, professors know your name, and the Lions' basketball games in the HEAL Complex are the social center of the week. The campus sits on 64.4 acres in the heart of Augusta, minutes from the Augusta National Golf Club, and the chapel anchors spiritual life in the Methodist tradition both founding churches still share. Students describe a welcoming, close-knit atmosphere; the trade-off is that a school this small has lived through real existential scares — accreditation battles, a hurricane — and the students who stay tend to be the ones who chose Paine on purpose.