Dallas, Texas · Founded 1872 · Tigers
“The college that killed its football program and turned the field into a farm — the nation's first urban work college, still preaching WE over Me in South Dallas.”
The single best one-video history of the school: founding in 1872, the Waco years, the 1990 Dallas move, near-closure, Sorrell's turnaround, the farm, the work-college model, the Village Program, and the $20M gift — produced by the North Dallas Gazette.
The Splendid Table / American Public Media segment on the WE over ME Farm — the original national-media telling of the football-field-to-farm story.
Short-form HBCU history piece: Paul Quinn nearly shut down in 2007, then the president turned the football field into a farm and rewrote its future.
Long interview with Sorrell on ditching football for a community farm, pioneering the work-college model, the gym etched with civil-rights history, and blunt takes on NIL and the NCAA.
Sorrell's signature talk — the longest-serving president in the college's 151-year history laying out the WE over Me ethos and the Four Ls of Quinnite Leadership.
Sorrell's 2017 Aspen Institute address describing the Paul Quinn transformation and values-based leadership to a national fellowship cohort.
The commencement where Southwest Airlines surprised every graduate with two round-trip tickets hidden under their seats — the corporate-partnership culture on full display.
Commencement honoring the classes of 2020 and 2021 in Richard Allen Chapel, with Thasunda Brown Duckett — then TIAA president and CEO — as speaker.
Full 2025 commencement ceremony on the Richard Allen Chapel lawn in Dallas.
The 2026 commencement — the year Texas Rep. James Talarico made his surprise appearance as speaker.
Homecoming mini-documentary with Charles Smith of the class of '71 — the Waco-to-Dallas generation of Quinnites, filmed in Highland Hills.
Homecoming mini-doc with President Sorrell himself walking the yard — the transformation's architect on the campus he rebuilt.
Negro Leagues pitching great — Detroit Stars and Kansas City Monarchs, the Negro leagues' all-time saves leader — elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 2006. Attended Paul Quinn when it was still in Waco; Baseball-Reference and the Hall list the school on his record.
Theater producer, director, and mentor to the late actor Ossie Davis; cited by BlackAmericaWeb among Paul Quinn's notable alumni.
Member of the Michigan Sports Hall of Fame; cited among Paul Quinn's notable alumni in the University of North Texas's Paul Quinn College archive.
Former lead singer with Kirk Franklin and God's Property, the Grammy-winning gospel choir; cited among Paul Quinn's notable alumni in the University of North Texas's Paul Quinn College archive.
Class of 2000; founded a Dallas law firm with a Paul Quinn classmate and was an early, vocal alumni backer of Michael Sorrell's transformation — 'the alumni are overwhelmingly enthusiastic with the changes Mike has made.'
Completed Paul Quinn High School in 1923 and the college in 1927, then taught for a decade and raised her family in Tulsa, Oklahoma; her oral history is preserved in the University of North Texas archives. Her father, W.D. Johnson, was the college's chancellor in 1923.
Featured alumnus in the PQC Homecoming Mini Doc series (Part 2), representing the Waco-to-Dallas generation of Quinnites; specific career details not documented in sources reviewed.
Featured alumnus in the PQC Homecoming Mini Doc series (Part 1); specific career details not documented in sources reviewed.
Recognized by HBCU Buzz as the oldest living Paul Quinn alumna at the time of her passing; a link to the college's earliest generations.
All documented as Paul Quinn attendees from Denton, Texas, in the University of North Texas's Paul Quinn College archive — a reminder that for generations of Black Texas families, Quinn was the college.
On April 4, 1872, a small group of circuit-riding African Methodist Episcopal preachers founded the school in Austin, Texas, as the Connectional School for the Education of Negro Youth (also rendered in period sources as the Connectional High School and Institute). Its mission was plain and urgent: educate the freedmen and their children, just seven years after emancipation. In those first years there was no campus at all — classes were held in churches and in people's homes. Bishop John M. Brown served as the first president, and the school is the oldest historically black college west of the Mississippi River.
The school moved to Waco, Texas, in 1877 and took the name Waco College, settling first at 8th and Mary Streets. It was a modest one-building trade school modeled on the Tuskegee Institute pattern. Freedmen were taught blacksmithing, carpentry, tanning, and saddle work — the practical occupations open to Black men in an increasingly segregated state. It was an industrial-education college first, with the classical curriculum still to come.
In May 1881 the State of Texas granted the school its official charter, and it was renamed Paul Quinn College to commemorate Bishop William Paul Quinn (1788–1873), the fourth bishop of the AME Church, who had presided over the church's western states for nearly thirty years. AME districts across the South had raised the money to improve the college, and more than twenty acres of additional land was purchased in Waco. The curriculum broadened at the same time to include Latin, mathematics, music, theology, and English alongside vocational training in carpentry, sewing, and household work.
An 1898 profile in the AME Church journal The Educator shows Paul Quinn with seven faculty members, four of them women — a notable fact for a Black college in the 1890s South. The school offered elementary, secondary, and college courses under one roof. To pay for its Waco buildings, the state AME Church had run a 'ten cent a brick' campaign among its members, and the main brick building, dining hall, faculty offices, and three small men's residence halls were all paid for brick by brick by church members. That member-by-member fundraising culture would define the college's finances for the next century.
Paul Quinn became a founding member of the Southwestern Athletic Conference (SWAC), the legendary Black college athletic league, and competed there from the 1920–21 season through 1928–29. The Tigers of that era played their football and basketball inside the world of segregated college athletics, when HBCU conferences were the entire stage. The school would not stay in the SWAC, but the founding-member line remains one of the proudest entries in its athletic record.
The Great Depression hit Paul Quinn brutally. When A.S. Jackson became president in 1932, enrollment had collapsed to 125 students and the college carried about $42,000 in debt. Jackson put students and staff to work restoring and maintaining the buildings themselves, and organized 'Progressive Clubs' — combinations of alumni and friends — to drive fundraising. By 1936 the clubs had paid $10,500 on the debt and enrollment was back above 300. It was the first of several times the college would survive by its own sweat.
The Texas Department of Education granted Paul Quinn accreditation in 1938, recognizing improvements to campus and curriculum. In a telling arrangement of the era, Prairie View — the state's only public Black college — taught courses on Paul Quinn's campus during the Depression years, keeping the curriculum alive when Paul Quinn's own faculty couldn't cover it. It was survival through cooperation between Black institutions, a theme that runs through the school's whole history.
Between 1950 and 1954 Paul Quinn experienced a massive physical expansion in Waco: a campus church, a student union building, a new administration building, and a gymnasium went up, and major renovations swept the older buildings. Two new dormitories, a modern two-story classroom building, a fully equipped science department, and a new library followed. Then in 1954 a women's residence hall burned down, and the Waco Chamber of Commerce ran a $100,000 campaign to replace it — the first significant fundraising effort for the college by non-AME members. For a decade, Paul Quinn looked like a college with a future.
Dr. Stanley E. Rutland became president in 1969 and steadied the physical plant: a new gymnasium went up, historic Johnson Hall was renovated, and an Ethnic Cultural Center was developed. The big prize came in 1972, when the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS) accredited Paul Quinn for the first time. A few years later, in the early 1970s, Dean William Milton Collins turned around a school that had been struggling as larger regional institutions opened their doors to Black students — rebuilding enrollment and the academic approach before the 1980s decline set in.
After a brutal 1980s of falling enrollment and money trouble, Paul Quinn made the boldest move in its history: it left Waco for southeast Dallas, acquiring the 146-acre campus of the defunct Bishop College (closed 1988) through African-American businessman Comer Cottrell. In its first semester in the new home, the college enrolled 1,020 students and became the only HBCU in the Dallas–Fort Worth area. The old Waco campus at Elm Avenue — once part of the Garrison Plantation — was left behind; William Decker Johnson Hall there sat vacant for years. The Tigers had a new den in South Dallas.
Paul Quinn's athletic teams began competing in the Red River Athletic Conference (RRAC) in the 1998–99 academic year, where they would stay for more than a quarter century. The Tigers fielded nine intercollegiate varsity sports: men's basketball, cross country, soccer, and track & field, plus women's basketball, cross country, soccer, track & field, and volleyball. They also competed as an independent in the United States Collegiate Athletic Association (USCAA). The RRAC years were mostly quiet on the national stage — until the school finally left for an all-HBCU league in 2025.
Board of Trustees member Peggy Sterling and her employer, American Airlines, secured the global management-consulting firm Boston Consulting Group to analyze the college's operations and performance pro bono. BCG's work produced a blueprint that became the college's Strategic Plan from 2007 to 2012. It was an unusual move for a tiny struggling HBCU — hiring the consultants that advise Fortune 500 boards — and it set the stage for everything Michael Sorrell would do next. The school knew it was dying; now it had a plan.
In March 2007, board member Michael Sorrell — a Chicago native, Oberlin basketball standout, Duke-trained lawyer, former NBA agent, and Barack Obama campaign worker with no academic administration experience — agreed to serve as interim president on a 90-day contingency while the trustees searched for a permanent hire. He became permanent president that September, when a deal to buy the NBA's Memphis Grizzlies and make him team president fell through. Three days into the job, Sorrell disbanded the football program: it cost upwards of a million dollars a year to run, the team had years of abysmal records, and a plea to alumni to match the funding went entirely unanswered. He also instituted a business-casual dress code — no saggy pants, sweats, or pajamas on weekdays — to prepare students for professional life. Enrollment had fallen from 550 in 2007 toward a low of about 150, the school was 18 months to two years from closing, and a trustee had embezzled thousands from its accounts. Sorrell has now been president since 2007, the longest-serving presidency in the college's history.
In 2009 SACS challenged Paul Quinn's accreditation, citing problems with institutional effectiveness and financial stability. It was an existential threat: lose accreditation, lose the college. The school sued, and a judge issued an injunction that reinstated accreditation before the lawsuit was heard. Sorrell later said the crisis forced the college to confront a 'culture of mediocrity' head-on. In 2011 the college joined the Transnational Association of Christian Colleges and Schools (TRACS) as an additional accrediting agency. Behind the scenes, the turnaround was real: the college produced budget surpluses above $2 million in fiscal 2009, 2010, and 2011, earned unqualified audits, and cut institutional debt by 40 percent.
What started as a half-joke became the symbol of the whole transformation. In 2008 Sorrell had talked with local real estate magnate and philanthropist Trammell S. Crow about community farming on a tract of land; raised planting beds were the first experiment. Then, with the old football field sitting empty for three years and the campus sitting in a USDA-classified food desert — the nearest grocery store nearly four miles away — Sorrell decided the college would grow its own food. Funded by Crow and PepsiCo's Food for Good initiative, the field was rebuilt as a 100-yard organic farm growing spinach, herbs, watermelon, potatoes, sweet potatoes, and arugula. It was dedicated on May 10, 2010. Before the dedication was even held, the farm had landed a major customer in Legends Hospitality, the Dallas Cowboys-backed firm that runs food service at AT&T Stadium; Yahoo! Sports reported the farm would supply about 17,500 pounds of food to the stadium in the 2013 season. Roughly a fifth of the gross yield goes to the surrounding community. Students lead the farming, the business plans, and the marketing. This is the centerpiece of the Paul Quinn story: in football-obsessed Texas, the school traded the gridiron for greens.
At the end of 2011 the college locked horns with the City of Dallas over the McCommas Bluff Landfill, about 1.5 miles east of campus, when the city moved to route all of Dallas's waste there — effectively making it one of the largest landfills in the Southwest, in a neighborhood already labeled a food desert. In June 2011 students organized a town hall and invited city officials to explain themselves; more than 250 residents showed up, the largest town hall in that council district in over twenty years. The meeting turned into 'I AM NOT TRASH,' two student-led demonstrations at Dallas City Hall. The council still voted 8–7 to move forward without any prior study of the effects. On November 5, 2011, about 500 people marched with Quinnite students and civic leaders from South Dallas across a Trinity River bridge into downtown. It was Paul Quinn's loudest civic moment — students as agents of change, exactly what the mission statement promised.
In August 2012, citing student health concerns, Paul Quinn banned pork and pork products from being sold in its cafeteria — one of the first colleges in the country to do so — and loaded the menu with more turkey, salads, and healthy options. It was a small decision with a big message: the same school growing organic produce on its football field was going to feed its students like it meant it. A few months earlier, in March, hundreds of community members had joined Paul Quinn students on campus to protest the killing of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida. In 2013 the college created a $7,500 Scholarship for Social Justice for a student showing potential to bring change to the community and the justice system — a direct response to the Zimmerman acquittal.
Paul Quinn became one of only eight federally recognized work colleges in America — and the first in an urban environment, the first HBCU so designated — when the U.S. Department of Education approved its application. Every student works 10 to 20 hours a week as part of the curriculum, and the work program cuts average tuition by roughly $10,000. The model, which Sorrell named the 'urban work college,' pairs a capped, debt-averse tuition (cut from over $23,000 a year to around $14,000) with required internships, career-focused majors, and a curriculum that teaches grammar, rhetoric, critical thinking, and digital literacy across disciplines. Enrollment, which had bottomed near 150 in 2010, climbed past 500 and kept rising; retention rose from 38 percent in 2007–08 to the mid-60s and beyond. Sorrell's stated mission: end intergenerational poverty. The rallying cry never changed: WE over Me — the needs of the community supersede the wants of the individual.
The accolades started stacking up. HBCU Digest named Paul Quinn the first-ever HBCU of the Year, alongside HBCU Business Program of the Year and HBCU Student Government Association of the Year honors, and the school landed on the President's Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll. In 2016 Sorrell launched the African-American Leadership Institute, aimed at economic development, education, public policy, and leadership in North Texas's Black community. Then in 2018 Fortune magazine named Sorrell one of the World's 50 Greatest Leaders, ranking him with Tim Cook and Bill and Melinda Gates for turning a dying college into what EDUCAUSE called one of the most innovative small colleges in America.
In 2018 Paul Quinn broke ground on the Trammell S. Crow Living and Learning Center, the first new campus building in more than four decades: a 30,000-square-foot dormitory, a gym seating up to 1,500, and a wellness center, completed in 2021. The same year the college opened a work-program expansion site in Plano, Texas — its first footprint beyond the Dallas campus — later backed by a $1 million grant from the Strada Education Network. The master plan behind it all was bolder than dorms: Sorrell told D Magazine in 2024 that the school intends to effectively 'build a city' on its 146 acres, with housing the college controls so students aren't scattered in apartment complexes across Dallas. 'We innovate because of what happens when we don't innovate,' he said. 'If we don't innovate, food deserts still exist.'
In 2021 Paul Quinn announced it would house an International Baccalaureate school on its campus serving students in grades six through twelve — a charter-school partnership built with KIPP and Dallas ISD during the pandemic, when students were sent home for 18 months and the administration treated the shutdown as a strategic-planning exercise. The idea: grow a future pipeline of Quinnites while putting the campus to work for the neighborhood's kids. It is the work-college ethos applied to K-12 — the college as a community anchor, not a walled garden.
At the 150th-anniversary commencement in May 2022, the Rev. Howard-John Wesley, senior pastor of Alfred Street Baptist Church in Alexandria, Virginia, stunned the graduating class with a $250,000 investment fund — money to be held in trust by JPMorgan Chase and disbursed to graduates in ten years, a wealth-building tool aimed squarely at first-generation, Pell Grant graduates. 'The number one tool in the fight against poverty is access to capital,' Sorrell said. The corporate partnerships kept coming: Southwest Airlines, which became the college's official partner in October 2022 with paid internships for Quinnites, surprised the entire Class of 2024 at commencement with two round-trip tickets each to any Southwest domestic destination — tucked under their seats.
In the summer of 2024 an anonymous donor gave Paul Quinn $20 million, the largest single gift in the college's 152-year history. Sorrell told the Dallas News the money would go to 'places that will increase the viability, sustainability and appeal of the campus' — physical and program upgrades, most notably building out the school's banking and finance program ('banking in this region is an enormously attractive profession,' he said) and funding a permanent office of development. Enrollment stood around 700. 'You are special, $20 million times over,' Sorrell told the students. The same year, the college modernized its backbone with Ellucian Colleague SaaS — what Dallas Innovates called a 'rebooting' of its technology systems to support the mission of smashing intergenerational poverty.
Paul Quinn left the Red River Athletic Conference after 27 years and joined the HBCU Athletic Conference (HBCUAC) — the only all-HBCU conference in the NAIA — alongside fellow Texas school Huston-Tillotson, effective with the 2025–26 season. 'The Quinnite Nation is tremendously excited,' Sorrell said, citing the chance to renew 'friendly rivalries with Wiley and H-T,' gain a streaming platform, and elevate the programs nationally. The HBCUAC, rebranded from the Gulf Coast Athletic Conference in 2024, had just signed the largest media-rights deal in NAIA history with Urban Edge Network. For the first time since the 1920s SWAC days, the Tigers are playing in a league made entirely of Black colleges. Athletics has also grown on campus, with a new basketball court and an expanded soccer program — the sports that replaced the football the school gave up in 2007.
Paul Quinn kept making national news into its 154th year. In May 2026, Texas State Representative James Talarico made a surprise appearance as commencement speaker — his team contacted by the college only the week before — and told the graduates that 'being disillusioned means being freed from illusions,' urging their generation's civic power. The 2026 commencement, like those before it, was held on the Richard Allen Chapel lawn and streamed on the college's official YouTube channel. Sorrell remains president, now the longest-serving in school history, with enrollment up roughly 250 percent since 2010 and waiting lists in most years. The farm still grows where the football field was. The motto still reads WE over Me.
The Texas HBCU rivalry Paul Quinn's own president names. When the Tigers joined the HBCU Athletic Conference in 2025, Michael Sorrell said the Quinnite Nation was excited to renew its 'friendly rivalries with Wiley and H-T' — Wiley, the Marshall, Texas HBCU, now a conference foe in basketball, soccer, and track. No single classic game defines it yet; the rivalry is being built in real time in the HBCUAC era.
Austin's HBCU and Paul Quinn's fellow 2025 HBCUAC entrant — both schools left the Red River Athletic Conference together. Sorrell named H-T alongside Wiley as the rivalry the move was partly about. Two Texas HBCUs, one new all-Black-college league, and a shared history of competing for the same recruits and the same headlines.
A longtime Red River Athletic Conference sparring partner in East Texas; the Tigers and Bulldogs met regularly in basketball through the RRAC years, including a 63–55 Jarvis win in November 2025 just as Paul Quinn was exiting the league. The rivalry now continues only in non-conference scheduling.
Bishop College was Dallas's other Black college until it closed in 1988 — and in 1990 Paul Quinn bought its campus from Comer Cottrell and moved in. Whether the Tigers and the Bishop Bulldogs had a true rivalry on the field before Bishop folded is not documented in the sources reviewed, but the lineage is direct: Paul Quinn literally plays on Bishop's ground.
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The Divine Nine shape leadership at Paul Quinn — an NBC DFW segment profiles D9 members in student leadership and notes a donation funding the school's first fraternity house. NPHC orgs appear on the campus orgs list alongside Multicultural Greek Council organizations; honor societies include Phi Delta Kappa and Alpha Chi. With 40+ student organizations total, Greek life is one thread in a fabric dominated by the work-college model, SGA, the Vocal Ensemble, and the PQC Spirit Team. Individual chapter names and charter dates were not verified — flagged.
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Between 1950 and 1954 the college erected a campus church, student union building, gymnasium, and administration building, then added two dormitories, a modern two-story classroom building, a fully equipped science department, and a new library. The Waco Chamber of Commerce's 1954 $100,000 drive rebuilt the women's dormitory lost to fire. It was the largest construction program in school history to that point.
Under President Stanley Rutland the college added a new gymnasium, renovated the historic Johnson Hall, and developed the Ethnic Cultural Center — the physical improvements that underpinned the 1972 SACS accreditation.
Sorrell's first years brought more than $4 million in capital improvements with no new debt: academic standards raised, institutional debt cut 40 percent, audit findings resolved, and — with a $1 million donation — more than a dozen abandoned, blighted campus buildings demolished. The campus went from eyesore to presentable.
The old football field was converted into a 100-yard organic farm in partnership with PepsiCo's Food for Good initiative and philanthropist Trammell S. Crow, dedicated May 10, 2010. It grows spinach, herbs, watermelon, potatoes, sweet potatoes, and arugula; donates roughly a fifth of its yield to the South Dallas community; and sells to Legends Hospitality for AT&T Stadium. Students run the farming, business plans, and marketing — it doubles as a work-college job site.
Paul Quinn opened its first expansion site in Plano, Texas, extending the urban work-college model beyond the Dallas campus. The Strada Education Network later put $1 million behind the Plano campus's development.
The first new building on campus in more than 40 years: a 30,000-square-foot dormitory plus a gym seating up to 1,500 and a wellness center. It answered the school's biggest bottleneck — housing demand it couldn't meet, with students scattered in apartments across Dallas — and was celebrated at completion in 2021.
An IB school serving grades 6–12 moved onto the Paul Quinn campus in partnership with KIPP and Dallas ISD, turning the college into a community education anchor and building a pipeline of future Quinnites from the surrounding neighborhood.
Southwest became the college's official airline partner in October 2022, bringing paid internships and workforce-development programming for Quinnites — the corporate-partnership model (PepsiCo, Legends Hospitality, now Southwest) that funds the work-college experience.
The anonymous $20 million gift — the largest in school history — is funding physical and program upgrades headlined by a new banking and finance program aimed at moving students into high-earning careers, plus a permanent office of development to sustain fundraising.
The college 'rebooted' its technology systems with Ellucian Colleague SaaS, a comprehensive modernization of student information and administrative systems to support enrollment growth and the work-college model.
With football long gone, the college invested in the sports that replaced it — a new basketball court and an expanded soccer program (men's and women's) — timed with the move into the HBCU Athletic Conference and its Urban Edge Network streaming platform.
Sorrell told D Magazine in 2024 the long-term plan is to effectively 'build a city' on the 146-acre campus, adding college-controlled housing and facilities so the school never again has to scatter students across Dallas. As of the interview it was a stated vision, not a funded construction program.
Sorrell's arrival in 2007 was famously disruptive — about 20 of the college's 150 faculty and staff left or were fired in his first stretch, a turnover the faculty senate president at the time publicly noted. The administration he built is lean, corporate-partnership-driven, and organized around the work-college model: every student works, every program ties to a career. The college's 'Four Ls of Quinnite Leadership' — leave places better than you found them; lead from wherever you are; live a life that matters; love something greater than yourself — are recited as the institutional creed.
The 34th president and longest-serving in school history; Chicago native, Oberlin basketball standout, Duke JD/MA, Penn EdD; Fortune 2018 World's 50 Greatest Leaders; architect of the urban work-college model.
Took over Paul Quinn athletics ahead of the 2024–25 season after three years as AD at Georgetown College (Kentucky); led the department through the 2025 move from the RRAC to the HBCU Athletic Conference.
Named head coach for the 2026–27 season after three years leading LSU Alexandria; inherits a Tigers program that regularly tests itself against NCAA Division I opponents.
Paul Quinn feels less like a traditional college and more like a mission with dorms. Every student works 10–20 hours a week, the dress code runs the week, and the campus sits on 146 acres of rolling, wooded hills in Highland Hills, South Dallas — ten minutes from downtown, on the DART light rail line, in a neighborhood the USDA calls a food desert. The student body runs about 700, majority female (historically ~63%), at least 12% Hispanic, and overwhelmingly Pell-eligible — the school recruits the students most colleges call 'at risk' and calls them Quinnites. Flashpoints have defined the culture as much as classes: the 2011 'WE ARE NOT TRASH' landfill march on downtown Dallas, the 2012 Trayvon Martin protest, the pork ban in the cafeteria. Lighter moments too — HBCU Buzz reported the college once sent a surprise acceptance letter to actress Keke Palmer. The Village Program lets Pell Grant recipients enroll family members alongside them, and corporate partners from PepsiCo to Southwest Airlines are woven into daily life. It is a small, intense, proudly unconventional campus.