Atlanta, Georgia · Founded 1881 · Jaguars (former)
“The number-one HBCU in America — a private women's college in Atlanta where sisterhood, scholarship, and service run 144 years deep.”
The full May 17, 2026 commencement address to the Class of 2026 — the newest Spelman graduation speech on record, 'Build anyway' as the charge to the graduates.
The college's own recap of the 2025 Baccalaureate and Commencement — the largest graduating class in Spelman history (694 degree candidates), with Taraji P. Henson as the 138th commencement speaker.
Angela Bassett's full 137th commencement address, May 19, 2024 — she called Spelman 'the higher education equivalent of Wakanda.' Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson received an honorary degree the same day.
The 'Black-ish' star's 136th commencement address (2023), for which she received an honorary doctorate of fine arts — on joy, worthiness, and 'making space for your whole self.'
The fourth time in Spelman history four women shared the valedictorian title — with Nikole Hannah-Jones of the 1619 Project as keynote.
First Lady Michelle Obama's 2011 keynote commencement address — the signature modern Spelman graduation moment, delivered to a class introduced by President Beverly Tatum.
Audio of theologian Howard Thurman's Spelman baccalaureate meditation, recorded in 1980 a year before his death — a treasured piece of the school's spiritual history.
The 2025 edition of the nearly century-old joint concert with the Morehouse Glee Club — the lead-in to the 100th annual concert in 2026.
The 2024 full concert from Morehouse's King Chapel and Spelman's Sisters Chapel — spirituals, carols, and the combined choirs' signature finales.
The 2022 livestream of the beloved concert's return to three nights of in-person performance after two years of pandemic-era virtual shows.
The second night of the 96th annual concert — the Saturday performance traditionally held in Spelman's own Sisters Chapel.
The 2020 fully virtual Christmas Carol Concert — the pandemic year's version of the Atlanta holiday tradition, streamed to viewers worldwide.
Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist of 'The Color Purple' (C'1961); mentored by Howard Zinn during the civil rights years
Founder of the Children's Defense Fund; civil rights activist who was a Spelman student during the 1960 sit-ins
Politician, voting-rights leader, and 2018/2022 Georgia gubernatorial nominee (C'1995)
CEO of the King Center; youngest daughter of Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King (C'1985)
Former CEO of Walgreens Boots Alliance and Sam's Club; first African-American woman to lead a Fortune 500 company as CEO; Spelman's interim president 2024–2026 (C'1984)
Actress, producer, director; Tony winner; met husband Samuel L. Jackson on the Spelman stage in the Morehouse Spelman Players (C'1971)
Actress best known as Rudy Huxtable on 'The Cosby Show' (C'2001)
Actress known for 'House of Payne' and Tyler Perry films (attended; C'1986)
Playwright and novelist ('Blues for an Alabama Sky'); her play 'The Sale' was performed by the Morehouse Spelman Players (C'1971)
Bestselling novelist of 'An American Marriage'; Oprah's Book Club pick (C'1991)
Former dean of Harvard College; historian of science
Civil rights and criminal defense lawyer; one of the first Black women admitted to the D.C. bar (C'1938)
Musician, activist, historian; founder of Sweet Honey in the Rock; key voice of the civil rights movement's freedom songs (C'1970)
Pioneering opera singer; first Black singer with a long-term contract at the Metropolitan Opera (C'1946)
Emmy-winning actress of 'Good Times' (attended 1940s)
Member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors; economist (C'1986)
Actress ('House Party,' 'Baby Boy') (C'1985)
Former U.S. Deputy Surgeon General and Spelman's first alumna president (1997–2002) (C'1955)
On April 11, 1881, two New England schoolteachers and Baptist missionaries — Sophia B. Packard and Harriet E. Giles, both of the Oread Institute in Worcester, Massachusetts — opened the Atlanta Baptist Female Seminary in the basement of Friendship Baptist Church. Their founding pastor ally was the Rev. Frank Quarles. They began with 11 African-American women, some of them formerly enslaved, most illiterate, and $100 given by the First Baptist Church of Medford, Massachusetts, plus a promise of backing from the Woman's American Baptist Home Mission Society. The first circular was bold for the time: algebra, Latin, geometry, political economy, chemistry, astronomy, zoology, the U.S. Constitution, and rhetoric — a liberal arts vision, not a charity trade school.
Word spread fast through post-Reconstruction Atlanta. When the first term ended, the little basement school had enrolled 80 students; by the end of the first year nearly 200 women and girls were attending. The Woman's American Baptist Home Mission Society made a down payment on a nine-acre site nearby — five buildings left over from a Union Civil War encampment — and the school moved there in 1883 to its present grounds. The city's Black community itself carried much of the early load, with donations and volunteer teachers keeping the doors open. That community ownership is still part of how Spelman tells its story.
In 1882 Packard and Giles traveled north to raise money and were introduced at a Cleveland church conference to John D. Rockefeller, a Northern Baptist industrialist. He visited the school in April 1884, found 600 students and 16 faculty, and was so impressed he settled the property's debt. His wife Laura Spelman Rockefeller, her sister Lucy Spelman, and their parents — Harvey Buel and Lucy Henry Spelman, longtime abolitionist activists — became patrons too. The seminary was renamed Spelman Seminary in honor of Laura Spelman Rockefeller and her parents. Rockefeller also funded Rockefeller Hall, built in 1886 and still the oldest building on campus. A Rockefeller has sat on Spelman's board of trustees ever since.
With the seminary charter granted, Sophia B. Packard was appointed Spelman's first president in 1888. The year before, in 1887, the school had conferred its first high school diplomas on six women — every one of whom went on to become a teacher. Packard died in 1891, and Harriet E. Giles succeeded her, leading the school until her own death in 1909. The two founders' names remain all over campus — Giles Hall, Packard Hall — and their graves sit side by side in the Atlanta University Center.
Spelman granted its first college degrees in 1901, to Jane Anna Granderson and Claudia T. White — the formal moment the seminary became a degree-granting college in fact, not just aspiration. The curriculum had been expanding toward collegiate work since 1897. For context: twenty years earlier, Spelman's first students were learning the alphabet; now its graduates held bachelor's degrees. That arc — from literacy work for freedwomen to a full liberal arts college — is the founding engine of the school's reputation.
After Giles's death, Lucy Hale Tapley became president and steered Spelman decisively toward higher education over secondary schooling. Under her, the nursing curriculum was strengthened, a teachers' dormitory and a home-economics building went up, and Tapley Hall — the science building — was completed in 1925. She also founded the Granddaughters' Club for students whose mothers and aunts had attended Spelman, a club that still exists today. Tapley herself was traditionalist about women's roles — she said any course that failed to cultivate 'practical and efficient work' had no place at Spelman — but her administration built the physical and academic base for the modern college.
In September 1924 the school officially took the name Spelman College, closing the book on the seminary era. The high school division would be discontinued altogether by 1930 as the college committed fully to collegiate education. Florence Matilda Read became president in 1927. The name change marked what the school had already become in practice: a four-year liberal arts college for Black women with graduate ambitions for its students.
The Spelman College Glee Club was founded in 1925 and today is the oldest collegiate choir of African American women in the nation. Two years later it began the annual Spelman-Morehouse Christmas Carol Concert with the Morehouse College Glee Club — a tradition that has now run for nearly a century and anchors Atlanta's holiday season. The Glee Club has performed at the White House and toured internationally across Canada, Brazil, Portugal, and Italy. Its 100th season is being celebrated in 2025–26, the 'Road to 100' that the current choir calls its centennial run.
Sisters Chapel, one of the most important buildings on campus, was dedicated in 1927, named for its primary benefactors — sisters Laura Spelman Rockefeller and Lucy Maria Spelman. It was the largest venue on the Spelman and Morehouse campuses at the time, which is why the first Christmas Carol Concert was held there. Under Read the college also built a $3 million-plus endowment fund and the Arnett Library, and earned approval from the American Association of Universities.
Spelman entered an 'agreement of affiliation' with nearby Morehouse College and Atlanta University, chartering the Atlanta University Center in 1929 — the beginning of the largest consortium of historically Black institutions in the world. The deal: Atlanta University would provide graduate education while Morehouse and Spelman handled the undergraduate classes. At a time when Black students were shut out of graduate study at white southern research universities, that cross-registration gave Spelman women immediate access to graduate courses. The center's partners today include Clark Atlanta University, the Interdenominational Theological Center, Morehouse College, and the Morehouse School of Medicine, sharing the Robert W. Woodruff Library.
In 1930 the Spelman Nursery School was created as both a training center for mothers and a practice arena for students headed into education and child development. Spelman celebrated its 50th anniversary in April 1931, a milestone marked by the construction of a university library shared among the Atlanta University Center institutions. The center still shares a library to this day. These years built the shared infrastructure — joint library, joint graduate access, shared campus life — that makes the AUC a single lived community rather than four separate schools.
In 1947 Spelman joined the list of 'approved institutions' of the Association of American Universities — national academic recognition at a time when the school was still fighting the broader South's assumption that Black women's education ended at domestic training. The approval signaled that Spelman's undergraduate program met the standards of the country's leading research universities. It also strengthened the school's hand in placing its graduates in medical schools and graduate programs, a pipeline Spelman still leads.
When Florence Read retired in 1953, Albert E. Manley became the first Black and first male president of Spelman. Under him the study-abroad program (the Merrill Foreign Travel-Study Program, 1956) was established, the John D. Rockefeller Jr. Fine Arts Building went up in 1964, and three new residence halls — Dorothy Shepherd Manley Hall (1964), Howard-Harreld Hall (1968), Sally Sage McAlpin Hall (1973) — plus the Albert E. Manley College Center (1973) reshaped the campus. In 1958 the college earned full accreditation from the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools. Manley also established faculty rank, tenure, and promotion, and instituted the Black Studies program in 1969.
On March 9, 1960, the Atlanta University Center students — including Spelman's Marian Wright (later Edelman), Josephine Jackson, and Roslyn Pope — published 'An Appeal for Human Rights' as a full-page advertisement in the Atlanta Constitution, Atlanta Journal, and Atlanta Daily World, and it was picked up nationally, even read aloud in Congress by Senator Jacob Javits. It was the intellectual manifesto of the Atlanta student movement, written by students from all six AUC schools. Spelman women were at its center from the first draft. This is the document that turned the AUC into the moral engine of the Atlanta civil rights struggle.
In 1962 the first Spelman students were arrested after sit-ins in downtown Atlanta. Their history professor was the noted historian Howard Zinn, who advised the campus chapter of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and mentored students including Alice Walker and Marian Wright Edelman. The administration — Manley in particular — resisted the movement; Edelman later described Spelman as 'a tea-pouring, very strict school designed to turn Black girls into refined ladies and teachers.' In 1963 Zinn was dismissed for supporting the students. The episode remains the sharpest internal conflict in Spelman's history: a college founded to lift Black women up, suppressing the very students doing it.
Donald M. Stewart became president in 1976 and presided over significant growth, tripling the college's endowment during his tenure. He founded the departments of women's studies and chemistry, created the Comprehensive Writing Program, the Ethel Waddell Githii Honors Program, the Women's Research and Resource Center (the first of its kind on a Black college campus), a continuing-education department, and a computer literacy program. Stewart retired in 1986. His administration converted Spelman from a strong regional college into a nationally ranked liberal arts institution with serious research infrastructure.
In 1987 Johnnetta Betsch Cole became the first African-American woman president of Spelman. Between 1986 and 1996 she led the college's most successful capital campaign to that point, raising $113.8 million — including a $20 million gift from Bill and Camille Cosby that built the Camille Olivia Hanks Cosby Academic Center (dedicated 1996). Cole also instituted the Cole Institute for Community Service and deepened the college's ties to Atlanta's neighborhoods. She stepped down in 1996. Note: in July 2015, as allegations against Bill Cosby mounted, Spelman returned the remainder of the Cosby funds and discontinued the endowed professorship named for the couple.
Audrey Forbes Manley, class of 1955, became Spelman's first alumna president in 1997. Under her the college earned a Phi Beta Kappa chapter, was accepted as a provisional member of NCAA Division III athletics, and finished the state-of-the-art Albro-Falconer-Manley Science Center (opened 2000). The NCAA chapter matters: Spelman built a seven-sport varsity program — basketball, cross country, golf, soccer, softball, tennis, volleyball — under the Jaguars nickname. She retired in 2002.
Beverly Daniel Tatum became the ninth president in 2002 and served until 2015, launching the strategic plan 'Spelman ALIVE' — Academic excellence, Leadership development, Improving the infrastructure, Visibility of accomplishments, Exemplary customer service. Under her, Sisters Chapel was renovated and the Wellness Center at Reed Hall was finished (opened 2015) — the seed of the wellness revolution to come. In 2005 her SpelBots became the first and only HBCU team, the only all-women's team, and the only U.S. undergraduate team to qualify for the international RoboCup four-legged robot soccer competition in Osaka, Japan.
First Lady Michelle Obama delivered the keynote commencement address in 2011, receiving an honorary doctorate alongside actresses Debbie Allen and Phylicia Rashad. The next year, 2012, Oprah Winfrey gave the keynote. Both visits cemented Spelman's status as the premier stage in Black higher education — the place the most prominent Black women in America come to speak. Recent commencement speakers continue the pattern: Tracee Ellis Ross (2023), Angela Bassett and Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson (2024), Taraji P. Henson with a 138th commencement that graduated the largest class in school history (2025).
In late 2012 President Tatum announced, and in May 2013 Spelman completed, one of the boldest moves in college athletics: the school withdrew from NCAA Division III and discontinued all seven varsity sports, becoming only the second NCAA member school in a decade to do so. The math: about 80 student-athletes, a budget near $1 million a year, a disintegrating four-team Great South Athletic Conference — against a voluntary wellness program already drawing 300+ students a week with no room. The athletics money was reallocated to a campus-wide Wellness Revolution for all students: fitness, nutrition, and the new Wellness Center. Spelman has had no varsity athletics since; there is no conference, no division, no athletic scholarships — the Jaguars exist only in memory.
Mary Schmidt Campbell became the tenth president in 2015, launching the school's largest comprehensive campaign with a $250 million goal. The Wellness Center at Reed Hall opened the same year — indoor track, cycling room, teaching kitchen, and fitness programs. In 2017 Spelman's leadership voted to admit transgender women, making official a policy that gender identity, not sex assigned at birth, governs admission. Campbell retired in 2022. Her name now anchors the campus's flagship new building: the Mary Schmidt Campbell Center for Innovation and the Arts.
In January 2024 Spelman trustee Ronda Stryker and her husband William Johnston (chairman of Greenleaf Trust) gave $100 million — the largest single donation in Spelman history and one of the largest ever to any HBCU. Seventy-five million dollars went to endowed scholarships; the remaining $25 million funds an academic focus on public policy and democracy, improved student housing, and flexible strategic needs. It capped a run of historic gifts: $30 million from Stryker in 2018, $40 million from Reed Hastings and Patty Quillin in 2020 for scholarships, and a large 2020 gift from MacKenzie Scott.
Helene Gayle — the epidemiologist, former CDC official, CARE and Chicago Community Trust leader named the 11th president in 2022 — took a personal leave of absence in late 2024 and then resigned permanently; the college never disclosed the reasons. Rosalind 'Roz' Brewer, Spelman class of 1984, former board chair of 12 years, former CEO of Walgreens Boots Alliance and Sam's Club, and part-owner of the Atlanta Falcons, stepped in as interim president. Her 18-month interim stewardship kept the college stable through a turbulent leadership stretch.
In April 2025 Spelman opened the Mary Schmidt Campbell Center for Innovation and the Arts — 82,500–84,000 square feet, roughly $86–96 million, designed by Studio Gang (Jeanne Gang) with Atlanta's Goode Van Slyke as associate architects. It is the first new academic building at Spelman in 25 years and the first Spelman facility ever erected outside the school's walls, on a former parking lot at Lee Street, West End Avenue, and Westview Drive. Inside: the Arthur M. Blank Innovation Lab, a 3,200-square-foot black box theater, dance and music studios, a recording studio, photography and documentary filmmaking spaces, and an expanded Spelman College Museum of Fine Art. It broke ground in April 2022 and opened with music and dance classes already in session.
On June 5, 2026, the board of trustees announced Dr. Ayanna Howard as Spelman's 12th president, effective August 1, 2026. Howard — a world-renowned roboticist and AI pioneer, former NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineer, 15-year Georgia Tech faculty leader, and most recently dean of engineering at Ohio State with 300+ publications — is a homecoming for Atlanta. She succeeds interim president Rosalind Brewer. The throughline is hard to miss: the school whose SpelBots made RoboCup history in 2005 is now led by one of the most prominent robotics researchers in the world.
Spelman has no athletic rivalries because it has no athletics. The seven-sport NCAA Division III program was shut down in May 2013 and replaced with the campus-wide Wellness Revolution; the Jaguars nickname is retired. There are no rivalry games, no classics, no conference trophies anywhere in Spelman's modern identity.
The defining inter-campus relationship is not a rivalry but a partnership: the Spelman-Morehouse 'SpelHouse' bond, anchored by the joint Christmas Carol Concert (since 1927), shared homecoming, cross-registration, and the shared AUC campus. Any talk of a Spelman 'rival' in the HBCU world usually means Bennett College — the other premier HBCU women's college — but that sisterhood is cultural, not competitive, and no organized rivalry exists.
🥁 Spelman College Glee Club · since 1925
Spelman has no marching band and has had no marching band tradition — the school's varsity athletics were discontinued in 2013. The premiere performance organization is the Glee Club, founded 1925, described by the college as the oldest collegiate choir of African American women in the nation. Its annual Christmas Carol Concert with the Morehouse College Glee Club, begun in 1927, is the signature musical institution of the Atlanta University Center. Earlier Glee Club directors before Dr. Johnson could not be verified from accessible sources.
Director of the Glee Club and chair of Spelman's music department; in his 21st year at the 2019 93rd Christmas Carol Concert. Arranger of signature pieces including 'Glory to God' and 'We Are Christmas' (with Sarah Stephens, C'2007).
Spelman is the rare HBCU where Greek life arrived late and deliberately: sororities were voted down three times and banned until 1979, when four of the campus's six sororities were chartered in the same year — the year the college's longstanding consensus that "Spelman itself is a sisterhood" finally gave way. Only the four NPHC sororities are possible on this women's campus; participation remains unusually small (~3% of students), and the sisterhood identity of Spelman itself is the dominant affiliation. Distinctive chapters: Epsilon Eta (Sigma Gamma Rho) was chartered as a 1974 citywide Atlanta chapter and became the first sorority chapter ever established at Spelman on January 2, 1979; Eta Kappa (Delta Sigma Theta), chartered 1970, spent its first decade as a non-exclusive chapter before petitioning to come home exclusively to Spelman; Mu Pi (Alpha Kappa Alpha) has initiated over 1,080 women since 1979; Beta Iota (Zeta Phi Beta) was revived in 1993. The service tier runs through Gamma Sigma Sigma's Eta Zeta and band-service through Tau Beta Sigma's Iota Rho, and Spelmanites can also join the AUC-wide Alpha Phi Omega chapter at Clark Atlanta.
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Funded by John D. Rockefeller after his 1884 visit, Rockefeller Hall is the oldest building on campus — the physical proof of the patronage that let a basement school become a college.
Completed under Lucy Hale Tapley, the science building anchored the shift toward a serious collegiate curriculum in the sciences during the 1910–1927 growth period.
Named for benefactors Laura Spelman Rockefeller and Lucy Maria Spelman, Sisters Chapel was the largest venue on the Spelman-Morehouse campuses and hosted the first Christmas Carol Concert. Renovated under Beverly Tatum in the 2000s.
Built under Albert Manley, the fine arts building became the home of Spelman's drama department and the Baldwin Burroughs Theatre — where LaTanya Richardson Jackson (C'71) and Morehouse student Samuel L. Jackson performed together in the Morehouse Spelman Players in the early 1970s.
Built in Manley's final years alongside new residence halls (Dorothy Shepherd Manley Hall 1964, Howard-Harreld Hall 1968, Sally Sage McAlpin Hall 1973), the college center gave the growing campus its student-union heart.
Built with the $20 million Cosby gift, the academic center was the centerpiece of Johnnetta Cole's $113.8 million campaign. In July 2015, as allegations against Bill Cosby grew, Spelman returned the remaining funds and discontinued the endowed professorship named for the couple; the building's naming has remained a point of quiet controversy.
The state-of-the-art science center, finished under Audrey Manley, was stocked with equipment funded by Spelman's NSF/NASA Model Institution for Excellence grant and anchored the school's reputation as the top baccalaureate producer of Black science and engineering doctorates.
A state-of-the-art recreation center — indoor track, cycling room, teaching kitchen, fitness and wellness programming — it is the physical home of the Wellness Revolution that replaced varsity athletics. Completed under Beverly Tatum.
Dedicated October 24, 2024, during homecoming, the renovated theater, lobby, dressing rooms, and supporting areas in the Rockefeller Fine Arts Building were named for the alumna actress and her Morehouse husband. They gave $5 million — the largest alumna donation in Spelman history — toward a $17.3 million total raised, with the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation, Bank of America, and David Rockefeller Jr. The dedication included the unveiling of a mural of the couple's lifetime in the arts.
Opened April 2025 after a 2022 groundbreaking: 82,500–84,000 sq ft, ~$86–96 million, designed by Studio Gang with Goode Van Slyke. The first new academic building in 25 years and the first Spelman facility ever built outside the school's walls, housing the Arthur M. Blank Innovation Lab, a 3,200-sq-ft black box theater, dance/music studios, a recording studio, photography and documentary filmmaking spaces, and the expanded Spelman College Museum of Fine Art.
Spelman is building its first new residence hall in nearly two decades, adding about 320 beds to a campus that currently houses roughly 1,400. Two older halls were judged 'frankly not worth renovating' and un-air-conditioned, per the AJC. The goal: house 85% of students on or within a mile of campus.
The 2024 $100 million gift directs $25 million toward an academic focus on public policy and democracy, improved student housing, and flexible strategic funding — the next wave of campus investment is expected to land here in the coming years.
No athletic director or coaches exist — there is no athletics department. Notable former faculty include historian Howard Zinn (dismissed 1963 for backing student civil rights protests) and college organist Joyce Johnson, a longtime campus fixture.
Roboticist, former NASA JPL engineer, ex-dean of engineering at Ohio State, 12th president.
Spelman C'1984; former Walgreens Boots Alliance and Sam's Club CEO; 12 years as board chair.
Long-tenured director and arranger of the choir's signature Christmas concert pieces.
All 11 residence halls house about 1,500 students and every first-year student lives on campus, so the 39-acre campus is dense and walkable — everything happens within earshot. The AUC cross-registration means Spelman women take classes with Morehouse men constantly, and the shared Woodruff Library is the de facto study hall of the whole center. Students describe it as a pressure cooker of ambition: the country's top-ranked HBCU, tiny classes, and an alumnae network that includes a former CEO of Walgreens and a Pulitzer winner.