San Antonio, Texas · Founded 1898 · Phil the Tiger
“The westernmost HBCU in America — born in 1898 as a sewing class for six Black girls, now the only school in the country federally designated as both an HBCU and a Hispanic Serving Institution.”
The college's official 2022 commencement livestream — graduation is the centerpiece rite at SPC, where 2,000+ graduates cross the stage twice a year.
Fall 2025 commencement — the same season the college's first Bachelor of Applied Technology in Cybersecurity cohort graduated, a milestone for its first bachelor's degree.
Spring 2026 commencement — the college's 154th commencement cycle, held at record enrollment of nearly 21,000 students. (Title confirmed via YouTube listing.)
The college's official introduction video — campuses, programs, and student life in San Antonio, TX. (Embedded on the SPC profile page.)
The SPC Philosophy Faculty's 2023 May graduation awards ceremony (May 11, 2023) — Teaching Excellence and Outstanding Student awards tied to the 148th Commencement, where David Robinson spoke. (Embedded on the SPC Philosophy Awards page.)
Professional baseball player in the Negro leagues with the Chicago American Giants
Photographer and author
Class of 1936; as of 2022 the oldest living SPC and Alamo Colleges District alumna (born May 20, 1913); 27 years of civil service at Kelly Air Force Base; honored with birthday bashes by the college and car parades
Professor and noted SPC graduate cited in the college's historical record
Professor and noted SPC graduate cited in the college's historical record
Professor and noted SPC graduate cited in the college's historical record
Culinary arts student awarded a competitive internship in Napa Valley, California (2022)
Bishop R. W. Elliott of the Missionary District of West Texas envisioned a church for the nearly four million recently freed Black citizens of Texas, campaigning for Sunday schools and religious services for African Americans. His successor, James Steptoe Johnston — a Mississippi Confederate veteran who became the first Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of West Texas — took up that charge. In 1895, under Johnston's authority, St. Philip's Episcopal Church for Negroes was founded in an old German Methodist church in downtown San Antonio later known as La Villita. It was the first Episcopal church for African Americans in the Diocese of West Texas.
On March 1, 1898, St. Philip's Normal and Industrial School opened in an old adobe house at what is now 502 La Villita, as a weekend sewing class for six Black girls, taught by Miss Alice G. Cowan, a missionary with the Episcopal Church. Bishop Johnston founded it to educate and train the daughters and granddaughters of emancipated slaves; he regarded education as the tool for solving the race problem. The congregation of St. Philip's Church, seeking a Christian-oriented education for African Americans, organized the class, which soon evolved into a vocational day school in the church rectory at 306 La Villita Street. Funded by student fees and private donations, the school would carry the nickname Bowden's School through its early decades.
From 1898 to 1900, instruction was directed by Miss Alice Cowan. In 1900, Mrs. Mary E. E. (Snowden) Walker came from Baltimore to serve as school administrator, with Perry G. Walker directing the school from 1900 to 1902 at the original La Villita site. Their two-year stewardship kept the young school running while its Episcopal sponsors searched for long-term leadership. Walker left in 1902, and what she handed off was still small — a handful of pupils in an adobe house. What came next would define the college's entire first half-century.
In September 1902, Artemisia Bowden — the daughter of a former slave from Georgia and a graduate of St. Augustine's Normal School (now St. Augustine's University) in Raleigh, North Carolina — joined St. Philip's as administrator and teacher. She would serve the school for 52 years. Under her supervision, the institution grew from an industrial school for girls into a high school and later a junior college, earning the name Bowden's School. Her credo, quoted by every St. Philip's president since: 'It takes faith, hope and persistence to make a dream a reality.'
Bowden broadened the curriculum aggressively: literary courses were added in 1903, and teacher training soon followed. In 1906 the facility became the St. Philip's Normal, Grammar, and Industrial School, and in 1911 it was styled St. Philip's Normal Grammar and Industrial School — a parochial day school for Black children on its way to something bigger. Soon coeducational and operating out of a brick schoolhouse of its own behind the church, the school kept adding grades as San Antonio's Black community grew. Bowden was building, in plain sight, a college.
In 1917-1918, after buying an expandable four-acre site, St. Philip's moved from La Villita to its present location just east of downtown San Antonio — on what would become Martin Luther King Drive, in the East Side that is the historic home of the city's African American community. A Texas historical marker and a plaque at the original La Villita site still honor where the school began. The move planted the college in the neighborhood it has served ever since.
After several building additions, St. Philip's became a junior college in September 1927 — a junior college explicitly for the Black community of San Antonio and vicinity. Through a tireless campaign waged by President Bowden, the school entered the San Antonio Junior College System, offering liberal arts and vocational studies as a public-school branch while keeping the St. Philip's Junior College name. It was one of the few junior colleges in the South chartered for Black students, and it would hold that role for decades.
During the Great Depression, the Episcopal Church could no longer afford to support the school it had founded. President Bowden refused to let it close: she frequently spent her own money to pay teachers and keep the doors open, cajoled city officials into support when the church's resources ran dry, and toured the country with a quartet of singing students, fundraising donation by donation. Her fight earned her the title 'Savior of St. Philip's.' The school's 1932 catalog captured the era's spirit: 'There is perhaps as much romance surrounding the development of St. Philip's Junior College as there is of the Alamo City in which it is located' — the birth of 'the school that love built.'
In 1942, St. Philip's Junior College affiliated with San Antonio College and the San Antonio Independent School District, ending its era as a private Episcopal institution. The San Antonio School Board accepted it as the first junior Black college governed by a city school board — a milestone in municipal governance of Black education in Texas. It retained the St. Philip's name through the transition, the thread the community knew it by. Three years later, in October 1945, the colleges were placed under an elected district board of trustees — the San Antonio Union Junior College District, now the Alamo Colleges District.
St. Philip's College became an accredited institution in 1951, capping Bowden's five-decade climb from parochial day school to a fully accredited two-year college. Accreditation meant the college's credits and degrees carried formal national standing — graduates could transfer and employers could trust the diploma. It also locked in the institutional identity Bowden had fought for through war and Depression.
In 1954 — the same year the U.S. Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education — Artemisia Bowden retired after 52 years of service, with the title Dean Emeritus. She had been hired as the school's dean in 1943 to carry her work forward, and he stepped into the dean's chair on her retirement. Bowden died in 1969 and was interred in Corpus Christi. Decades later she would be posthumously restored to the title of President Emeritus (2015) and named a saint of the Episcopal Church — one of the few American college founders to be canonized.
Prompted by Brown v. Board of Education, St. Philip's College began admitting white students in 1955, while Black students were admitted to San Antonio College — making it one of the first community colleges in Texas to desegregate. Dr. Clarence W. Norris, who had been hired by Bowden as Dean of Faculty in 1943 and became Dean of the College in 1954, presided as the college's administrative leader through the desegregation of the 1960s. He was also a leading voice against a campaign to close St. Philip's and fold all students into San Antonio College — the school survived that threat too.
In early 1969, after 23 years of administrative service, Dr. Clarence Norris stepped down as Dean of the College and returned to the classroom, teaching sociology until his retirement in 1974. In 1970 he was named a Piper Professor by the Minnie Stevens Piper Foundation for outstanding scholarly achievement. In 1975 the district board named a building the Norris Technical Building in his honor and conferred the title of Dean Emeritus — 31 years of dedicated service to St. Philip's.
In 1982 the San Antonio Union Junior College District changed its name to the Alamo Community College District — the name the five-college district still carries today (now Alamo Colleges District). The rebrand signaled the district's regional identity as San Antonio's public community-college system. St. Philip's entered the 1980s as a member institution of a much larger, multi-campus system.
In 1987 St. Philip's added the Southwest Campus — formerly part of Kelly Air Force Base, on Quintana Road — as an official campus, after years operating as a district extension center. The southwest-side site became the college's hub for technical training programs. The Kelly connection runs deep in SPC's story: Gertha Lockett Murphy, a 1936 graduate and the district's oldest living alumna, worked in civil service at Kelly Air Force Base for 27 years.
A multi-million-dollar capital expansion in the 1990s transformed the physical campus: a state-of-the-art theater complex rose at the MLK campus; the Northeast Learning Center opened in 1996 (it later became the seed of Northeast Lakeview College, the district's fifth college); and the Learning and Leadership Development Center opened in 1997 in collaboration with the City of San Antonio. In 1998 the college celebrated its 100th anniversary with a year of events, reporting enrollment of nearly 9,000 students of many backgrounds — and launched its LVN-to-ADN nursing mobility program.
On March 1, 2007 — St. Philip's 109th anniversary — Dr. Adena Williams Loston assumed the presidency as the college's 14th president, and under her leadership the college has more than doubled in size. Loston, a former NASA chief education officer and associate administrator for education, had been either the first or only Black person in every position she held before arriving. She moved quickly: the First Presidential Scholarship was established in 2008, and the college re-established its formal relationship with St. Philip's Episcopal Church, its founding church.
On October 19, 2012, the college dedicated its Science Building in honor of Dr. William Conan Davis for his many contributions — a chemistry instructor who joined St. Philip's in 1983, conducted contracted research alongside his teaching, and chronicled the institution's history and demographics for the HistoryMakers oral history archive. The building naming recognized a faculty career that fused classroom teaching with real-world scientific work. It marked SPC's growing identity as a science and technical workforce institution.
Nearly fifty years after her death, Artemisia Bowden was recognized by the Episcopal Church as a Holy Woman: the 78th General Convention in Salt Lake City authorized adding her name to the liturgical calendar in 'Holy Women, Holy Men: Celebrating the Saints,' with August 18 as her feast day. On November 20, 2015, the college hosted a celebration of the sainthood decision. That same year, the Alamo Colleges Board of Trustees restored the title of President to Bowden posthumously, naming her President Emeritus — correcting a half-century of 'Dean Emeritus' paperwork with the office she actually held.
On March 1, 2018, St. Philip's celebrated 120 years of pride in the community at both the Martin Luther King and Southwest campuses. On August 9, 2017, the college had opened its Good Samaritan Veterans Outreach and Transition Center — a repurposed old hospital at 202 Connelly Street, built in partnership with the City of San Antonio — alongside the newly renovated E. L. Turbon Student Center. In 2018 SPC earned the Texas Award for Performance Excellence, and in November 2018 U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross named the Alamo Colleges District a recipient of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award — the highest national honor for organizational performance.
On August 18, 2022 — Saint Artemisia Bowden's feast day — St. Philip's hosted Legacy Day, opening four buildings in a one-day event: the Saint Artemisia Bowden Center of Excellence; the Tourism, Hospitality and Culinary Arts Center of Excellence; the Clarence Windzell Norris Building; and the William Allen Hudgins Health and Wellness Building. The celebration included a New Orleans-style Second Line Parade led by the SPC cheer team, the Student Government Association, employees with decorated umbrellas — and a drumline. That same year the cybersecurity program earned a prestigious NSA designation, SPC received $93.2 million in American Rescue Plan federal funds, and received a donated Gulfstream G-159 aircraft from businessman Dick Tipps.
March 1, 2023 marked St. Philip's 125th anniversary. At the 148th Commencement Ceremony in May, former San Antonio Spur David Robinson — himself a Naval Academy graduate with a master's from the University of the Incarnate Word — delivered the commencement address at the Freeman Coliseum. The college secured Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board approval for a bachelor's degree in cybersecurity, and on December 4, 2023, SACSCOC approval made it official: SPC would offer its first bachelor's degree, the Bachelor of Applied Technology in Cybersecurity. President Loston was appointed by President Joe Biden as Commissioner on the Presidential Advisory Commission on Advancing Educational Equity, Excellence, and Economic Opportunity for Black Americans.
St. Philip's now stands as the nation's westernmost HBCU and the only institution in the country federally designated as both an HBCU and a Hispanic Serving Institution — more than half its students are Hispanic, about 29 percent white, and 12 percent Black, and it was the first HBCU in America to become majority-Hispanic. The first cohort of its bachelor's-in-cybersecurity students graduated in fall 2025, feeding San Antonio's cyber hub, the nation's second largest. By spring 2026 the college reported record enrollment of nearly 21,000 students — up from the ~9,000 of its centennial in 1998 — and its 154th commencement cycle carried the alma mater 'St. Philip's, we love you because of your truth' out of the Freeman Coliseum once more.
No rivalries found — SPC fields no intercollegiate athletic teams (verified absent from the 2025-26 Athletic Handbook: only intramural/club sports through the Department of Student Life). There is no rival school to profile and none was invented.
VERIFIED ABSENT — not an unverified section: St. Philip's College has no marching band. Its music program consists of credit ensembles — Concert Choir, College Chorus, Jazz Show Choir, Jazz Ensemble, Guitar Ensemble, Instrumental Chamber Ensemble, and Music Theatre Workshop — and the campus is home to the Watson Fine Arts Center. Music shows up in campus life (the 1931 student singing quartet that toured for fundraising; a drumline leading the 2022 Legacy Day Second Line Parade), but there is no collegiate marching band to profile, and none was invented.
Still digging this up — check back soon.
No Greek-letter organizations; St. Philip's College is a two-year community college (also an HSI) in San Antonio. The only Greek item on the college's own records is a 2019 history entry: 'Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority Inc., Alpha Tau Omega Chapter Adopts SPC' — an alumnae chapter adopting the college as a community partner, not a collegiate chapter on campus. No NPHC collegiate chapters or Greek rosters appear in SPC's student-life materials.
Still digging this up — check back soon.
The Southwest Campus on Quintana Road — formerly part of Kelly Air Force Base — became an official SPC campus after years as a district extension center. It anchors the college's technical training programs on the southwest side of San Antonio, and is where the U.S. Secretary of Labor toured manufacturing and aerospace training sites in 2022.
The Northeast Learning Center opened in Converse, Texas — a milestone that later grew into Northeast Lakeview College, the Alamo Colleges District's fifth college. What began as SPC's expansion site became a sister institution in its own right.
Built in 1997 in collaboration with the City of San Antonio, the Learning and Leadership Development Center extended SPC's footprint into community partnership programming. It is currently undergoing renovations to reopen.
Three facilities opened together: a Welcome Center, the Center for Health Professions, and the Center for Learning Resources (library). The cluster gave the MLK campus a front door and consolidated the college's health-sciences and student-support core.
On October 19, 2012, the Science Building was named in honor of Dr. William Conan Davis — the chemistry instructor who joined the faculty in 1983 and combined teaching with contracted research — recognizing a career that bridged the classroom and applied science.
On August 9, 2017, SPC opened the Good Samaritan Veterans Outreach and Transition Center at 202 Connelly Street — a repurposed old hospital developed in partnership with the City of San Antonio — alongside the newly renovated E. L. Turbon Student Center. The veterans center later earned the Texas Veterans Commission's Gold-level VEERA recognition in 2022 and 2023.
The new Tourism, Hospitality and Culinary Arts building was completed, giving the culinary program — named among the 10 best culinary schools in Texas — a showcase home. It hosted the San Antonio Cowboy Breakfast in 2022, the Taste of Black Restaurant Week San Antonio, and ProStart educators; student Marcus Clark earned a Napa Valley internship from the program that year.
On August 18, 2022, SPC opened four buildings in a single one-day event: the Saint Artemisia Bowden Center of Excellence, the Tourism, Hospitality and Culinary Arts Center of Excellence, the Clarence Windzell Norris Building, and the William Allen Hudgins Health and Wellness Building. Renovations also expanded Automotive Technology, Histology, Biomedical Engineering, Vision Care, and Nurse Aide programs across the campus.
A ribbon-cutting on September 15, 2022 — during Hispanic Heritage Month — opened the new Welding and Auto Collision Center at the Southwest Campus, a major expansion of technical program offerings, alongside donated industry equipment like a Gulfstream G-159 aircraft for the aerospace programs.
SPC broke ground on the H-E-B Black Box Theater at the Watson Fine Arts Center, continuing investment in the East Side's arts home. The Watson center regularly hosts community performance, including free San Antonio Mastersingers concerts featuring the SPC Choir alongside San Antonio Philharmonic musicians.
SPC's leadership narrative is dominated by two figures: Artemisia Bowden, the founder-president who served 52 years, and Dr. Loston, the 14th president who has served since 2007 — both Black women, both former presidents of national significance. The college's strategic materials also note 181 faculty, 122 professional staff and dozens of part-time staff (fall 2017 snapshot), across three divisions: Arts and Sciences, Applied Science and Technology, and Health Professions.
Former NASA chief education officer and associate administrator for education; Alcorn State and Bowling Green State alumna; named one of the Ten Most Dominant HBCU Leaders of 2021 and appointed by President Biden as Commissioner on the Presidential Advisory Commission on advancing equity for Black Americans.
Appears alongside Loston in district leadership — attended the 2019 birthday celebration of 106-year-old alumna Gertha Lockett Murphy and the 2022 Secretary of Labor visit to the Southwest Campus.
Joined SPC's chemistry department in 1983, conducted contracted research on water chemistry while teaching, and sat for the HistoryMakers oral history archive on the institution's history and demographics. Honored with the 2012 naming of the Science Building.
SPC's student body is the story: the nation's only school federally designated as both an HBCU and a Hispanic Serving Institution — over half Hispanic, about 29% white, 12% Black — on an East Side campus rooted in San Antonio's historic Black community. Open admission keeps the door wide: the 2026 spring commencement program notes the college takes students pursuing associate degrees, certificates, continuing-education awards, and now a bachelor's in cybersecurity. Campus rhythm mixes workforce training (cybersecurity on-site cyber range, nursing, automotive, aviation with a donated Gulfstream) with arts and culture at the Watson Fine Arts Center, a grab-'n'-go food pantry, strong veteran services, and early-college high schools feeding the campus. The alma mater students still sing is 'St. Philip's, we love you because of your truth.'