Louisville, Kentucky · Founded 1879 · Falcons
“Kentucky's first HBCU — founded by freedmen in 1879, stripped to a Bible college by the Depression, and brought back from the dead under President Kevin Cosby, who bought the original campus back 77 years after it was sold.”
The full 147th commencement ceremony, May 9, 2026 — the school counts every year since 1879, lean ones included.
The 2022 commencement address, posted for the school's channel — graduation day at the revived HBCU.
The Ambassador Chorale — the school's premiere vocal group — performs a gospel medley at Louisville's 2024 Festival of Faiths.
The school's own underdog story in video form — the Depression-to-revival arc that defines Simmons' identity.
Author and commentator Yvette Carnell in conversation with President Kevin Cosby at a West Louisville forum — Cosby making the school's case in the community it serves.
President Cosby and AD Jerry Eaves talk through building the Falcons athletics program from scratch (KySports, 2025).
Video on the 2023 partnership between Simmons and UK's law, arts & sciences, and education colleges.
Full game film of the 2025 homecoming men's game vs Wilberforce, with play-by-play from Jerry Eaves and Anthony Eaves.
Full game film of the 2025 homecoming women's game vs Wilberforce — the Lady Falcons on the homecoming stage.
Rice FAME footage from Simmons' 2023 homecoming vs Shawnee State — the men won 61–58 on November 4, 2023.
A Black-history travel vlog visiting the downtown Louisville campus — outside eyes on Kentucky's first HBCU.
Short fan-made tribute in school colors (red, gold, black) with the Falcons eagle — grassroots school pride.
Baritone whose voice inspired the character Porgy in George Gershwin's 1935 opera 'Porgy and Bess' — he originated the role on stage.
Sociologist; the first Black professor to teach at the University of Louisville — and, by the school's account, at a white public university in the South.
Physician; likely the first African-American woman licensed to practice medicine in Kentucky. She taught at her alma mater while earning her license and kept teaching and practicing in Louisville afterward.
Suffragist, journalist, and educator; an early voice of Black Baptist feminism, founder of the National Baptist Women's Convention (1900), and a founder of the nation's first Black YWCA. She also taught at Simmons.
In 1967 became the first African American elected to the Kentucky Senate; served 21 years as a leading advocate for Black Kentuckians, women, children, the poor, and the handicapped.
Folk singer and actor whose a cappella vocals blended classical, spiritual, and blues traditions; father of internationally known acoustic blues artist Eric Bibb.
Educator and civil rights activist.
Architect — one of the early Black architects practicing in the region.
Louisville-based physician who served in World War I; trained at the Louisville National Medical College that merged into Simmons.
The college's second president (1880–1890) and namesake — the ex-slave who built it into a university.
Coached at Simmons, then became the football coach at Kentucky State University (1932–1943); scholar-in-residence Dr. Lawrence H. Williams names him among the coaching legends who started at old Simmons.
Coaching legend who, with Henry Arthur Kean, began his career at Simmons before making his name in Kentucky and Tennessee coaching circles.
In August 1865, just months after the Civil War ended, twelve Black Baptist churches gathered at Fifth Street Baptist Church in Louisville and organized the State Convention of Colored Baptist Churches in Kentucky, led by the pastor Henry Adams. There was no college anywhere in Kentucky that would admit a Black student, so the convention began talking about building one themselves — a school for the sons and daughters of people who were, in many cases, one generation removed from slavery. It was an audacious plan from people who owned almost nothing: educate their own. The school they dreamed up would become the birthplace of Black higher education in Louisville.
The convention weighed Frankfort, the state capital, as the home for its planned school, then decided instead to plant it in Louisville, the state's largest city and the center of its Black Baptist life. They gave the future school its first name: the Kentucky Normal Theological Institute. But naming a school is easier than building one — another full decade would pass before the trustees had the land and money to open the doors. For ten years the institute existed mostly as a resolution and a prayer.
In November 1879 the trustees of the Convention of Colored Baptist Churches in Kentucky finally acted, purchasing four acres of land on the corner of 7th and Kentucky Street in Louisville to serve as the campus. The Kentucky Normal Theological Institute opened its doors that same year under its first president, the Rev. Elijah P. Marrs. Marrs, the first pastor of Beargrass Baptist Church, served only about a year — but he opened the school that twelve churches had dreamed about for fourteen years. Simmons College of Kentucky counts this as its founding: 1879.
After Marrs's brief tenure, Dr. William J. Simmons became the school's second president in 1880 — and everything changed. Simmons had been born into slavery and had gone on to develop Howard University's teacher-training programs before coming to Louisville. Over his ten-year presidency he turned a tiny institute into a full university, adding liberal arts and college-preparatory courses alongside departments of medicine, law, business, music, and theology. The school also fielded competitive football, basketball, and baseball teams. When he died in 1890, the school he had built was unrecognizable from the one he inherited — and it would eventually carry his name.
A charter amendment formally recognized the school as a state university, and it was renamed State University — later styled the State University at Louisville. When William Simmons had arrived, the school had two teachers, thirteen students, and no operating capital; by 1884 enrollment had grown to 205 students. The former slaves' school was now, on paper and in fact, a university. Black Kentucky finally had an institution of its own that could grant degrees across the professions.
By 1893 the school enrolled 159 students, and by 1900 it was offering professional degrees in nursing and law in cooperation with the University of Louisville. With its law and medical departments, teacher-training school, and ministers' studies, Simmons was producing Black attorneys, physicians, teachers, and ministers — and had become the college of choice for Kentucky's Black middle class. A University of Louisville retrospective would later call it 'the Harvard of black Kentucky,' and the label stuck because it was true. No other institution in the state was doing what Simmons was doing for Black Kentuckians.
Charles L. Purce succeeded William J. Simmons as president in 1894 and led the school through the turn of the century, a period when Simmons kept growing in both size and reputation. Purce held the presidency until his death in 1905 — eleven years at the top of Black higher education in Kentucky. His death in office closed the school's first great era of stable, long-tenured leadership.
The school, then called State University, entered into an affiliation agreement with the Louisville National Medical College and merged the two institutions. For a Black medical school in the Jim Crow South, merging with a growing Black university was a bid for survival and legitimacy. The combined institution could now train Black doctors under its own roof — a rare thing in America, and a point of enormous pride for the school's supporters.
The Rev. William T. Amiger served as president from 1908 until 1916, steering the school through the 1910s as it continued operating as a comprehensive Black university. His eight-year tenure sits between the Purce years and the Parrish era — a bridge across a decade when Black colleges nationwide were fighting for every dollar. The school's Baptist roots stayed central: it was still the child of the Black Baptist convention that had founded it.
Simmons lost its medical school in 1912, when the Flexner Report's brutal assessment of American medical education shuttered Black medical schools across the country that it deemed 'ineffectual.' The Louisville National Medical College, which had merged with Simmons just five years earlier, was among the casualties. It was a devastating blow — training Black physicians had been one of the school's proudest missions — and a preview of how fragile Black institutions were when national standards were written without them in mind.
Charles Parrish — himself a former slave and a graduate of the school — became president in 1918 and improved the endowment and academic offerings. Under Parrish the institution was renamed Simmons University in honor of William J. Simmons, the ex-slave president whose decade of leadership had made it a university in the first place. The renaming was a statement: this school's greatness came from its own people, and it would honor them. Parrish's presidency carried Simmons into the 1920s, its golden decade.
By 1922 Simmons enrolled more than 500 students and stood unchallenged as the college of choice for Kentucky's Black middle class. A surviving photograph of the 1922 Simmons College Band captures the era's confidence — uniforms, instruments, and pride. The faculty included remarkable figures: Jane Alice Browne Bond, the grandmother of future NAACP board chairman Julian Bond, and Mary Virginia Cook Parrish, the suffragist and journalist who helped found the nation's first Black YWCA. The school was producing people like baritone Robert Todd Duncan, whose voice would inspire the character Porgy in Gershwin's 1935 opera, and sociologist Charles Parrish Jr., who would become the first Black professor at the University of Louisville. Simmons was, by every measure that mattered, thriving.
The Great Depression hit Simmons like a wrecking ball. In 1930 the university was forced to sell its property after a foreclosure on the mortgage — the campus the freedmen had bought and built was gone. The University of Louisville purchased the bulk of the property as the site for Louisville Municipal College, U of L's segregated Black branch. As part of the purchase agreement, Simmons agreed to offer only religious instruction going forward. A comprehensive Black university was reduced, by contract, to a Bible school. The humiliation of the terms — dictated by the white university across town — was not lost on anyone in Black Louisville.
In 1934 the University of Louisville bought the remainder of the old Simmons property, and the school relocated to a smaller site at 18th and Dumesnil in West Louisville. It was a fraction of what the school had once held. Course offerings were gutted, buildings were lost, and the proud university of the 1920s survived only as a theological school. For the next half-century, Simmons would live in exile from its own campus — a Bible college carrying the name of a university.
When the University of Louisville finally opened its doors to Black students in the early 1950s, its segregated Black branch — Louisville Municipal College, sitting on the old Simmons campus — was closed, and the property was eventually sold to the local public school district. The buildings the freedmen had raised now belonged to the city school system. Simmons, meanwhile, stayed at 18th and Dumesnil, still teaching theology, still waiting. Few would have bet on its survival, let alone its resurrection.
In 1982 the school was renamed Simmons Bible College, a name that honestly reflected what the Depression had left it: a small institution training African Americans for the clergy, with a limited set of theology courses. The university's law school, medical school, business department, and music department were generations gone. For more than two decades the name told the whole story — a school that had once been the Harvard of Black Kentucky was now a Bible college on Dumesnil Street. But the charter, the name, and the history survived, and that turned out to be enough.
In 2005 the Rev. Dr. Kevin W. Cosby — senior pastor of Louisville's St. Stephen Baptist Church, one of the largest Black churches in Kentucky — was elected the 13th president of Simmons. Cosby, who reportedly takes no salary from the school, came in with a restorationist's vision: bring back the general-education mission the Depression had stripped away, rebuild the curriculum beyond theology, and reclaim the school's place in Black Louisville. A trustee later said of him, 'If I told him he could not swallow an elephant, he would say, I can if I take one bite at a time.' He started taking bites immediately.
In 2006 the school bought back its original campus at 7th and Kentucky — 77 years after losing it to foreclosure — and moved home. St. Stephen Baptist Church had purchased the property in the 1990s, which made the return possible. The same year, Simmons basketball took the court for the first time in 76 years, ending an athletic hiatus that stretched back to 1930; the 2006–07 team played its first home game that November under coach Stan Hughes. 'Sports programs give a school life and provide a much needed balance between work and play,' Cosby told the Louisville Defender. 'The team members become ambassadors for Simmons in the community.' The school also signed articulation agreements with the University of Louisville, Jefferson Community and Technical College, Spalding University, and Campbellsville University.
In 2010 Simmons attained candidate status with the Association for Biblical Higher Education (ABHE), the national faith-based accreditor — a milestone that immediately made the school eligible for federal Title IV student-aid funds. For a school that had operated for decades without accreditation or federal money, this was the hinge the whole revival swung on. Simmons also became a signature partner in 55,000 Degrees, the community-wide push to add tens of thousands of degrees in Louisville by 2020. The little Bible college was now plugged into the city's future.
Simmons won full accreditation from the Association for Biblical Higher Education in 2013, completing the academic half of the comeback. Because the institution was founded before 1965, accreditation made it eligible for federal designation as a Historically Black College or University. The Louisville Defender's Yvonne Coleman Bach summed it up for the NNPA: 'Simmons College is a story of revival.' A school that had been written off as a relic now held the credential that unlocks everything in American higher education.
The U.S. Department of Education formally recognized Simmons College of Kentucky as the nation's 107th Historically Black College and University — and Kentucky's second HBCU, alongside Kentucky State. On January 6, 2016, Congressman John Yarmuth rose in the House to honor it, calling Simmons 'the birthplace of Black higher education in Louisville' and saluting 'the faith that inspired this institution to persevere.' The designation unlocked federal HBCU funding streams. One hundred fifty years after twelve churches dreamed it up, their school stood in the Congressional Record.
The Baptist Seminary of Kentucky — a predominantly white institution founded in 2001 and previously housed at Georgetown College — relocated to the Simmons campus and began offering a Master of Divinity degree earnable entirely through classes taken at Simmons, with the first students enrolling in spring 2018. Cosby called it 'perhaps the first time in history that an accredited seminary has moved onto the campus of an HBCU,' framing it as racial reconciliation you could walk around in: 'Presence matters.' Around the same time, the National Baptist Convention of America, International made Simmons its official college and placed its headquarters on the campus. The child of the Black Baptists was now hosting the wider Baptist world.
In January 2023, Simmons women's basketball hosted Fisk University at the St. Stephen Family Life Center — the first meeting of two HBCUs ever held in the city of Louisville, with more than a hundred people packing the gym. Cosby, who had long envisioned athletics as an engine for West Louisville's revival, called it surreal: 'I serve a God who's able to blow your mind.' The same year Simmons signed a major partnership with the University of Kentucky spanning the Rosenberg College of Law, the College of Arts and Sciences, and the College of Education — the state's flagship university formally investing in the state's smallest HBCU. The Falcons also played exhibition games at the KFC Yum! Center against the Louisville Cardinals, the program's biggest stage.
President Cosby announced the purchase of a $6 million dormitory building from Spalding University — paid for by small donations and one very large one: $1 million from former University of Louisville basketball star Junior Bridgeman. For a school that had no campus housing at all, a real dorm was transformational. WDRB reported that enrollment had swelled to roughly 1,700 students from 30 states during the revival's peak years. BestColleges.com ranked Simmons second among all colleges in Kentucky — ahead of the University of Louisville — and BestValueSchools named it the most affordable four-year HBCU in America. The school the Depression had flattened was outranking the university that bought its campus.
In 2025 the University of Louisville returned Simmons' institutional archives, which it had housed since 1974 — rare editions of the Simmonola magazine, General Association of Baptists records, photographs, and artifacts from the school's academic, religious, and athletic past. 'This is more than just paper and photographs,' Cosby said. 'This is the soul of Simmons. This is who we are, and who we've always been.' Scholars at the college began planning a digital archive. On the court, Cosby brought in former UofL star guard DeJuan Wheat as men's basketball head coach, and Wheat led the Falcons to the first NCCAA Division II national tournament bid in school history.
Simmons held its 147th commencement on May 9, 2026 — counting every year since 1879, including the lean ones, which is exactly the point. The athletics program kept climbing: men's and women's track and field were added to the sponsored sports, and the second annual basketball luncheon drew about a hundred supporters on September 30, 2026, with UofL head coach Pat Kelsey giving the introductory speech. Athletic director Jerry Eaves — the former Louisville Cardinal guard who has built the department over twelve seasons, once cleaning the gym floors himself before home games — summed up the whole revival: 'It's the best job I've ever had. I should give my money back.'
The natural in-state HBCU measuring stick: Kentucky State is the public HBCU in Frankfort, Simmons the private one in Louisville — the state's only two HBCUs. They've met on the hardwood, with Kentucky State taking both ends of recent women's meetings (74–48 in November 2023 and 97–75 at the Exum Center in January 2024). No trophy, no nickname for the series yet — just the two Black colleges in one small state sizing each other up.
Wilberforce — the Ohio HBCU with its own survival story — has become Simmons' homecoming-stage opponent, with full broadcast game film from the 2025 homecoming doubleheader (men's and women's) called by Jerry Eaves and Anthony Eaves. Two small private HBCUs with parallel comeback narratives meeting every November is how new rivalries get born.
🥁 Simmons College Band (historic)
A photograph of the 1922 Simmons College Band survives from the university's golden decade, when music was a full academic department and the school fielded competitive football, basketball, and baseball teams alongside its band. The Depression wiped out the music department with everything else. No marching band operates at the college today; the modern musical life of the school runs through the Ambassador Chorale, described as the premiere vocal group at Simmons College of Kentucky, which performed a gospel medley at Louisville's 2024 Festival of Faiths.
Still digging this up — check back soon.
CORRECTION of prior research: Simmons does have Greek life. The 2025-2026 catalog carries an official GREEK LIFE section: 'Greek Life represents a cornerstone of the HBCU experience at Simmons... through Divine Nine organizations,' and the 2024 homecoming featured a Divine Nine step show. Individual chapter names and charter dates could not be verified — the catalog confirms D9 presence at the school level only. Chapter-level detail is flagged for a future check.
Still digging this up — check back soon.
Simmons bought back and moved onto its original campus at 7th and Kentucky Street — 77 years after losing it to foreclosure in the Depression. St. Stephen Baptist Church had purchased the property in the 1990s, which made the return possible. Coming home to the ground the freedmen bought in 1879 was the symbolic cornerstone of the whole revival.
The 2006–07 season was the first time since 1930 that Simmons sponsored an athletic program. The new team played its first home game that November under coach Stan Hughes, beginning the slow rebuild of Falcons athletics from zero — no gym of their own, no scholarships, just a team and a mission.
Full accreditation by the Association for Biblical Higher Education (candidate status came in 2010, unlocking Title IV federal aid) made Simmons eligible for federal HBCU designation — the credential upgrade that changed the school's funding future. The 2015 recognition as the 107th HBCU opened federal funding streams the school had never touched.
The Baptist Seminary of Kentucky relocated from Georgetown College onto the Simmons campus and began offering a Master of Divinity earnable entirely through Simmons-based classes. Around the same time the National Baptist Convention of America, International named Simmons its official college and put its headquarters on campus — denominational infrastructure landing on the little Louisville campus.
Simmons signed a formal partnership with the state's flagship university spanning the J. David Rosenberg College of Law, the College of Arts and Sciences, and the College of Education — collaborative programs aimed at Simmons students' professional and personal development. UK's provost called the potential 'unprecedented.'
President Cosby announced the purchase of a $6 million dormitory building from Spalding University, funded by small donations plus $1 million from former Louisville basketball star Junior Bridgeman. For a school with no campus housing, a real residence hall was transformational — students could finally live where they learned.
The school's current program roster shows how far the curriculum has come from the Bible-college days: a Teacher Education degree aimed at putting more minority teachers in Jefferson County Public Schools and across Kentucky (anchored at the Diane Porter Education Center on South 4th Street); a Second Chance Pell Initiative with the Kentucky Department of Corrections offering associate and bachelor's degrees in General Studies, Business Administration, and Sociology to incarcerated students at three Kentucky prisons; the school's first master's-level offering, a Master of Science in Medical Sciences; and the Rev. Jesse Louis Jackson Sr. Center for Racial Justice. Exact launch years for individual programs are unverified — listed here as the 2024–2026 program build-out.
The University of Louisville returned Simmons' institutional archives, which it had held since 1974: rare editions of the Simmonola magazine, General Association of Baptists in Kentucky records, photographs, papers, and artifacts from the HBCU's academic, religious, and athletic life. Scholars at Simmons began planning a digital archive so the school's own history would finally live on its own campus.
Former Louisville star guard DeJuan Wheat was hired as men's basketball head coach and promptly led the Falcons to the first NCCAA Division II national tournament bid in school history — the clearest on-court proof that the athletic rebuild, twelve seasons into Jerry Eaves's tenure as athletic director, had arrived.
Men's and women's track and field joined basketball and golf as sponsored sports, and the second annual basketball luncheon drew roughly a hundred supporters with UofL head coach Pat Kelsey speaking — a fundraising room full of Louisville basketball royalty investing in the little HBCU across town.
The faculty's historic bench runs deep: Jane Alice Browne Bond (grandmother of NAACP chairman Julian Bond) and suffragist Mary Virginia Cook Parrish both taught at Simmons in its university heyday. The modern school lists Dr. Lawrence H. Williams — author and historian — as scholar-in-residence. St. Stephen Baptist Church members mentor Simmons students directly, a pipeline Cosby built into the school's culture.
In office since 2005; also senior pastor of St. Stephen Baptist Church. The architect of the revival — campus repurchase, accreditation, HBCU designation, new dorms, new programs.
Former Louisville Cardinals guard (1978–82) under Denny Crum; twelve seasons building Simmons athletics from nothing — he once cleaned the gym floors and set out the chairs himself before home games. Brought in DeJuan Wheat as men's coach in 2025. 'It's the best job I've ever had,' he told the Courier-Journal in October 2026.
Former University of Louisville star guard, hired in 2025; led the Falcons to their first-ever NCCAA Division II tournament bid in his first season.
First-year head coach of the Lady Falcons in the women's program's inaugural 2022–23 season; his team made history that January hosting Fisk in Louisville's first-ever HBCU-vs-HBCU game.
Simmons sits at 1018 South 7th Street in West Louisville's 40203 zip code — an urban campus in one of the city's poorest neighborhoods, which the school treats as its mission field rather than its misfortune. Enrollment is open-admission: roughly 60% of students are first-generation and 78% qualify for Pell grants. The vibe is small, church-rooted, and earnest — a few hundred students, crimson and gold, calling themselves Kentucky's First HBCU and meaning it. St. Stephen Baptist Church is effectively the school's extended family, mentoring students and anchoring its community work.