Selma, Alabama · Founded 1878 · Bulldogs
“Built by Alabama's Black Baptists in 1878 to train their own ministers and teachers — 147 years of grit on Lapsley Street in Selma.”
WSFA 12 News coverage of the school's 148th Founders Day — the annual April gathering of alumni, pastors, and convention leaders that is the heartbeat of Selma University's calendar.
The Bulldogs baseball roster video from the @SelmaUsports athletics era — Athletic Director Raymond Brown, head coach Adrian Hollaway, SID Chico Cleveland — a window into the school's small-college sports identity.
President of the National Baptist Convention, USA, Inc.; the Jemison-Owens Auditorium/Gymnasium is named for him. Called one of the school's two most distinguished graduates by the Encyclopedia of Alabama.
President of the National Baptist Convention, USA, Inc. — the Encyclopedia of Alabama names him alongside David Jemison as the school's most distinguished graduates.
The matriarch of gospel music and mother of the Clark Sisters; studied classical music and choral singing at Selma University after high school before moving to Detroit, where she became the Church of God in Christ's longest-serving International Minister of Music.
Blues pioneer billed as 'The Southern Nightingale'; studied at Selma University, then won a 1922 talent contest that earned her a Black Swan record contract and hits like 'My Daddy Rocks Me' — with Louis Armstrong and Fletcher Henderson backing her.
Earned his MA in Bible and Pastoral Ministry from Selma University; former Army major; became the school's 25th president in 2024.
Montgomery pastor honored in the Congressional Record (2015); earned his Associate (2007) and Bachelor of Arts (2009) summa cum laude from Selma University, then his MA in 2011.
Earned his BA from Selma University; honored in the Congressional Record (2020) as a preacher whose 'bravery in and commitment to the Civil Rights Movement helped guide the moral trajectory of Alabama.'
Arrived in Selma in 1962 to attend Selma University, became a young SNCC activist helping register Black voters, stood on the front lines of Bloody Sunday and the Selma-to-Montgomery march, served as a bodyguard to Dr. King, pastored 40+ years, served in the Army, and later served over a decade as Selma city councilman (per the SPLC's memorial video description).
unverified: an alumni-directory page lists an alumnus by this name as serving in the Alabama House of Representatives 1994–2014; no independent source confirming the Selma University connection was found.
unverified: an alumni-directory page lists the voting-rights activist (who walked miles daily to register voters before 1965) as a Selma University graduate; no independent source confirming the connection was found.
unverified: an alumni-directory page lists him as a pastor, educator, and former university administrator; no independent source confirming the Selma University connection was found.
Shortly after emancipation, Black Baptists in Alabama formed the Alabama Colored Baptist State Convention to provide gospel order, correct doctrine, and education for pastors and the newly freed. The convention's leaders were convinced that education was one of the keys to improving their churches and elevating themselves socially and economically. Every step of what became Selma University would be decided by Black church people — not white missionaries, not the state.
At the convention's annual meeting in Tuscaloosa in 1873, William H. McAlpine proposed that the convention build a theological school in Alabama to educate young Black men for ministry. The convention sought the advice of white Baptists who were also meeting in Tuscaloosa, but they insisted the effort was impractical and suggested Blacks attend a new school opening in Atlanta. Despite that negative advice, and with McAlpine's urging, the Black Baptists of Alabama began to establish their own school.
The state convention began planning the school in 1874, meeting under the leadership of convention president Mansfield Tyler and electing a board of trustees. At a meeting in Mobile that year, the first trustees were elected: C. O. Booth, Alexander Butler, William H. McAlpine, Holland Thompson, and H. J. Europe. Delegates chose McAlpine to serve for six months as missionary and financial agent to raise money for the project — he was, in effect, the school's first fundraiser before it had a campus.
McAlpine and fellow convention member Charles O. Boothe were selected to find a suitable building site for the school, and McAlpine raised $1,000 for the proposed institution in 1876. A thousand dollars in 1876 Black Belt Alabama, raised from churches of sharecroppers and laborers, was a serious show of commitment. The money proved the convention's people were willing to pay for their own school out of pocket.
In 1877, the convention chose Selma over Marion and Montgomery as the location for what was then called the Alabama Baptist Normal and Theological School. The trustees recommended Harrison Woodsmall, a white missionary from Indiana, to be the first president. Selma — already a center of Black Baptist life in the Black Belt — would now hold the denomination's flagship school.
On January 1, 1878, the school opened with four students in the St. Phillips Street Baptist Church of Selma (which later became the First Baptist Church). That same year, the trustees purchased the 'Old Fair Grounds' in Selma for $3,000 — a 36-acre tract with a large amphitheater and several other buildings. The structures were renovated for $700 and pressed into service as classrooms and dormitories, giving the school a real campus almost immediately.
On March 1, 1881, the institution was incorporated by an act of the Alabama legislature under the name of the Alabama Normal and Theological School. Incorporation gave the little school legal standing in a state that otherwise ignored Black education. The legislature would later recognize the campus itself as a state landmark.
The Rev. Edward M. Brawley became president in 1883 and oversaw the establishment of a collegiate department — until then the school had offered programs only at the pre-college level. He also established the Alabama Baptist Women's State Convention as a fundraising auxiliary for the university. The women's convention would go on to build the school's first girls' dormitory with its own money.
In 1885, the name was changed to Selma University, according to the Encyclopedia of Alabama. The school's name would keep shifting with its fortunes: in 1895 it became the Alabama Baptist Colored University, and only on May 14, 1908 was the name officially changed back to Selma University. Each name change marked another turn in the school's long negotiation between ambition and survival.
In 1886, Charles L. Purce (rendered 'Punce' in the school's catalog) succeeded Brawley as president and proved a capable administrator, helping the university pay off a debt of $8,000. For a school funded by the collection plates of Black churches, clearing an $8,000 debt was a major achievement. In 1894 he left to accept the presidency of Simmons College of Kentucky, then known as the State University at Louisville.
By 1900, Selma University enrolled 382 students — the vast majority in the normal-school program training teachers for Black schools, with 57 others in ministerial studies. Since its founding the school had graduated 142 individuals from its normal school and 15 from its college department with bachelor's degrees. A limited number of ministerial students earned a bachelor's in Biblical Studies, but most received certificates — the school was still mainly a teacher-training engine for the Black Belt.
In 1901, Baptist minister and education reformer Charles O. Boothe took over as president, succeeded by Robert T. Pollard, who served two terms (1902–1914 and 1916–1930, per the Encyclopedia of Alabama; the school's catalog gives 1902–1911 and 1916–1929). During his presidency Foster Hall and Dinkins Hall were added to the campus, along with a president's home, a teacher's cottage, and a teacher-training center. Enrollment grew from 400 to 700 students, in part from expanded course offerings including industrial arts added in 1921, and the institution's debt was liquidated.
The Dinkins Memorial Chapel was completed in 1904 and named in honor of the Rev. C. S. Dinkins, president of the school from 1893 to 1901. The chapel would become the spiritual heart of the campus. It was destroyed by fire and rebuilt in 1921, then renovated in 1980 — a building that refused to disappear.
Foster Hall was built in 1910 and named in honor of Susie C. Foster, president of the Women's Baptist State Convention at the time of its construction. It followed Stone Hall, the 1889 girls' dormitory the Women's Convention had built and named for Miss Susie Stone, its secretary. Black Baptist women literally built the dormitories their daughters would sleep in.
In 1915, Selma University awarded a Doctor of Letters to William Pickens — the Yale-educated educator, essayist, and orator who served as a field secretary for the NAACP. That a tiny Black Baptist school in Alabama saw fit to honor one of the era's leading Black intellectuals, and that he accepted, says something about the school's standing in Black institutional life. The honor is cited in the Yale Beinecke Library's program on Pickens's life and papers.
On May 27, 1942, George Washington Carver delivered the commencement address at Selma University — a recording that survives in the Tuskegee University Archives, digitized in 2021 from the original reel-to-reel tape. During the address Carver recited the poem 'Equipment' by Edgar A. Guest. The digitized recording also carries introduction and opening remarks credited to 'Selma University President William Dinkins around 1965' — which conflicts with the school's own catalog listing J. H. Owens as president 1956–1967, an unresolved discrepancy in the published record.
Selma University found its college program was not competitive with other Black Baptist schools in numbers or quality of instruction, because it tried to run everything from elementary school through senior college. Other historically Black denominational schools had closed their pre-college programs to concentrate on a college curriculum, and the board of trustees and convention leadership agreed on the same course for Selma. The school was reorganized as a junior college with a separate school of religion — a humbling but honest reckoning with what it could actually sustain.
Selma University sat in the middle of the 1965 voting-rights movement — and played a fraught role in it. An April 1965 SNCC-authored document, 'Facts About Selma University,' charged that the administration and faculty discouraged students from participating in the Freedom Movement, penalized those who had participated, and frowned on any discussion of movement events; it described a strict cut system under which chapel absences could cost students academic credits. The school's campus was never a march staging ground — that was Brown Chapel and First Baptist — but its students lived the movement's central tension between respectability and resistance. A 1965 White Citizens Council document cited 'Dr. William H. Denkins' as the university's president at the time, another wrinkle against the catalog's presidential list.
Despite never achieving accreditation from the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, Selma University kept attracting students through the 1950s and 1960s, and by 1968 it was participating in federal programs assisting veterans and economically disadvantaged students. Federal grants and scholarships pushed enrollment to 310 by 1968, and new dormitories in 1970 brought further increases. But student unrest over federal-program awards and conflicts with administrators created tension — and fires broke out on campus. The college also faced increasing debt that split the trustees in the 1970s, and enrollment plummeted to fewer than 100 students.
In 1982, Wilson Fallin Jr. — the former president of Birmingham Baptist Bible College who had raised that institution's academic standards — became president of Selma University. Fallin's major contributions were increasing enrollment to 450, bringing in greater funding, and moving the school toward accreditation with SACS. His success came largely from aggressive fundraising from alumni, churches, and businesses, plus better communication with pastors that drove enrollment. In 1985, Fallin was succeeded by B. W. Dawson, who achieved full SACS accreditation for the school in 1986.
Accreditation was lost in 1994 after Dawson resigned from the institution because of conflict with trustees over his role as president. Losing regional accreditation less than a decade after winning it was a devastating blow — the second great institutional collapse in the school's modern history. The Rev. W. L. Muse steadied the school as acting president (1993–1994) and then president (1994–1997), followed by the Rev. James C. Carter as acting president (1997–1999).
On June 19, 1997, the campus — the old Alabama Baptist Normal and Theological School grounds — was designated an Alabama Landmark and added to the Alabama Register of Landmarks and Heritage. The state was officially recognizing what Black Baptists had built on the old fairgrounds. In 2023 the campus would go further, earning a spot on the National Register of Historic Places (reference #100009126, listed July 14, 2023).
The Rev. Alvin A. Cleveland Sr. became president in 1999 and would serve for more than twenty years — the longest continuous presidency since Pollard. In autumn 2000 he began the school's transformation from a Christian liberal arts college into a Bible college. The school earned applicant status with the Association for Biblical Higher Education in 2001, candidate status in 2005, initial accreditation on February 20, 2009, and full accreditation in 2014. During this era the school ran six satellite campuses — in Mobile, Montgomery, Greenville, Eufaula, and Evergreen — and the Bulldogs competed in the Southern States Conference (c. 1990–1997).
After receiving full ABHE accreditation in 2014, Selma University lost Title IV federal funding in 2019. The university had failed financial responsibility audits in 2016, 2017, and 2018 with low composite scores each year, and failed to repay a debt of over $730,000 after defaulting on three payment arrangements agreed between President Cleveland, vice president of fiscal affairs Robin Thomas, and the Department of Education. The Department also cited four IRS tax liens and two State of Alabama tax liens, plus an expired student-information-system contract that left the school unable to document student records. On February 21, 2020, the school was notified it violated six ABHE accreditation standards; it did not appeal and was placed on probation effective March 3, 2020.
Alvin A. Cleveland was replaced in June 2020 by Eddie J. Hill, recruited from outside the university to deal with its financial difficulties. Hill had been retired for more than four years and was the first Selma University president who was not also a minister — a break with 142 years of tradition. After eight months he resigned in February 2021, and Dr. Stanford E. Angion — vice president for academic affairs since 2016 — was appointed interim president.
In 2023, Selma University received a $750,000 grant from the National Park Service to preserve Pollard Hall — federal money going back into the historic Black campus the convention built. It was a striking turn for a school that had nearly collapsed under federal debt a few years earlier. The grant recognized the campus's national significance as a Black Baptist educational landmark.
On October 22, 2024, Congresswoman Terri Sewell rose in the House to celebrate the inaugural convocation and investiture of Dr. Stanford E. Angion as the 25th president of Selma University. Angion — a former Army major, an ordained Baptist minister, and a Selma University master's graduate himself — had run academic affairs since 2016, became provost in June 2020, and had served as interim president since 2021. A 2026 presidential synopsis reported the school had paid off the nearly $1,000,000 Department of Education debt, applied for regional accreditation with SACSCOC, and completed renovations to the A.W. Wilson Science Building, Gibbs Dining Facility, and Jemison-Owens Gymnasium — with Pollard Hall and Foster Hall renovations planned next.
unverified: no named rivalry game could be confirmed for the Selma University Bulldogs. The school competed in the Southern States Conference (NAIA) from circa 1990 to 1997, but no published source documents a recurring rivalry — named or otherwise — with any conference foe, or with cross-town Concordia College Selma. A ~500-student Bible college built around baseball and basketball, it never developed the football rivalries that define HBCU athletics.
Still digging this up — check back soon.
No Greek-letter organizations. The Selma University catalog's student-services section covers Campus Christian Life with no Greek organizations listed; the school's documented student life centers on chapel, the Ministerial Association, and the Baptist Student Union. An alumni-directory page auto-lists 'Fraternities, Sororities' under extracurriculars but gives no chapter names or details — not verifiable.
Still digging this up — check back soon.
The trustees bought the former Selma Fair Grounds for $3,000 — 36 acres with a large amphitheater and several buildings — and renovated the structures for $700 into classrooms and dormitories. For $3,700 total, Black Baptists bought themselves a college.
The Women's Baptist State Convention, organized in 1886, built a girls' dormitory in 1889 and named it Stone Hall in honor of Miss Susie Stone, secretary of the Women's Convention. Black Baptist women raised the money and built the building their daughters would live in.
The chapel was completed in 1904 and named for the Rev. C. S. Dinkins (president 1893–1901). Destroyed by fire and rebuilt in 1921, renovated in 1980 — the spiritual heart of the campus, standing for 120 years.
Built in 1910 and named for Susie C. Foster, president of the Women's Convention at the time of its construction. Along with Dinkins Chapel, it anchored the Pollard-era building boom; both were cited in the campus's historic-register listings. A 2026 presidential plan calls for completing Phases 1 and 2 of Foster Hall renovations.
Built in 1948 and named in honor of M. C. Cleveland Sr., constructed with materials taken from the Vickers Home and the Old Arcade Hotel in Selma — the campus literally recycled the city's old buildings into new ones.
Constructed in 1953 and named after Henrietta M. Gibbs. Renovated again in the 2025 campus renewal under President Angion.
Erected in 1960 and named for Susie Stone, secretary of the Women's Convention, and the Rev. U. J. Robinson, president of the Alabama State Missionary Baptist Convention — the women's auxiliary and the convention sharing one building's name.
Completed in 1966 and named in honor of the Rev. D. V. Jemison, president of the Alabama State Missionary Baptist Convention (and a distinguished alumnus), alongside the sitting university president. Still the campus's main gathering hall — the 144th Spring Commencement was held there in 2022 — and renovated in 2025.
The science complex was expanded with an annex housing an auditorium, several instructional laboratories, two computer facilities, and faculty offices — the school's late-1980s push into modern science instruction.
On June 19, 1997, the campus (the old Alabama Baptist Normal and Theological School grounds) was added to the Alabama Register of Landmarks and Heritage. In 2023 the campus was listed on the National Register of Historic Places (reference #100009126, July 14, 2023).
Selma University received a $750,000 National Park Service grant to preserve Pollard Hall — federal preservation money flowing back into the Black Baptist campus, a striking reversal from the federal debt crisis of 2019.
The president's 2026 synopsis reported significant renovations completed to the A. W. Wilson Science Building, the Gibbs Dining Facility, and the Jemison-Owens Gymnasium — the first major capital renewal in decades, funded after the school paid off its nearly $1,000,000 Department of Education debt.
Selma University runs on a skeleton crew typical of a ~500-student Bible college — the 2018 Chronicle's President's Council lists the president, VPs for academic affairs, student affairs, and fiscal affairs, plus a handful of instructors (Dr. Edward Hayes, Dr. John Henry Williams Jr., Ms. Shirley Crum). The 2022 catalog's faculty roster is similarly lean; the school's real institutional muscle has always been the Alabama State Missionary Baptist Convention behind it.
Former Army major (13 years, discharged 2000), ordained Baptist minister, pastor of Mt. Gilead Missionary Baptist Church in Coy, AL. Earned his MA in Bible and Pastoral Ministry from Selma University; ran academic affairs 2016–2020 before the presidency.
Twenty-one-year president who remade the school as a Bible college and won ABHE accreditation; his tenure ended in the 2019 Title IV collapse.
Listed on the President's Council in the school's 2018 Chronicle.
The fiscal officer named alongside President Cleveland in the defaulted Department of Education payment arrangements at the center of the 2019 Title IV crisis.
Led the Bulldogs baseball program as of the 2015 roster video; the school's athletics identity in the 2010s was built around baseball.
Athletic director during the 2010s Bulldogs era (@SelmaUsports).
Ran the @SelmaUsports media operation for Bulldogs athletics in the mid-2010s.
Selma University feels less like a typical college and more like a seminary that happens to grant bachelor's degrees. Students are overwhelmingly Black, mostly ministry-bound, many of them older working adults and pastors finishing degrees at the satellite campuses in Mobile, Montgomery, Greenville, Eufaula, and Evergreen. Chapel, preaching practice, and convention life are the social center — not Greek life, not a band, not big-time sports. The mission statement says it plainly: 'to prepare men and women to be servant leaders.'