Ettrick, Virginia (Petersburg area) · Founded 1882 · Trojans
“America's first fully state-supported four-year college for Black Americans, and still running with that chip on its shoulder — land-grant, orange and blue, and the Trojan Explosion for a heartbeat.”
The Trojan Explosion's full 2025 battle-of-the-bands show in crisp 4K — the current-era band at full power.
March-in footage from the 2026 season in Petersburg — the drumline's funky cadences rocking the whole way to the stadium.
The Explosion's 2026 Big HBCU Battle of the Bands performance at Savannah State, September 13, 2026 — the record-size band in competition.
The band playing 'Glad,' its signature crowd piece — the sound of a Trojan football Saturday in one clip.
The 2023 National Battle of the Bands in Houston — the same season the band hit the Today Show and the White House.
Full battles and highlights from Delaware State's HBCU Week, featuring VSU's Trojan Explosion alongside Hampton, Delaware State, and Lincoln.
Vintage 1993 halftime show vs. Hampton under Harold J. Haughton — the early Trojan Explosion era, nine years into the name.
Full halftime show vs. Fayetteville State in 2021 — the James Holden Jr. era band in conference action.
The 2014 'Meet the Trojans' event — the band introducing itself to campus with its signature piece.
2010 band battle footage from the Norfolk classic — the Phillips-era band in the season of the first White House visit.
The full 2021 homecoming show — the band's biggest stage of the year, alumni weekend in Ettrick.
The 2025 homecoming drumline in the pocket — the same line descended from the first drumline ever to play the White House.
Class of 1965; entered on a football scholarship, Harvard Law after VSU; bought Beatrice International Foods for $985 million in 1987 — the first Black-owned company over $1B in annual sales; the Reginald F. Lewis College of Business is named for him.
Class of 2011; Miss USA 2016 (Top 9 at Miss Universe 2016) — an Army officer when she won, and the school's most famous pageant queen.
Mathematician and co-developer of the GPS system — the satellite geodesy models that make your phone's maps work started with her computations.
Class of 1936; physicist whose mathematical analysis helped Linus Pauling's team identify the alpha helix, one of the fundamental structures of protein — the fifth African American to earn a physics Ph.D. in the nation.
Attended VSU on a football scholarship before leaving to serve in the Navy; became 'Uncle Phil' Phillip Banks on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, plus the voice of Shredder in the 1987 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
Transferred through VSU on his way between Alabama State stints — the Grammy-winning Atlanta rapper's HBCU road ran through Ettrick.
Attended VSU on football before transferring to Bowie State; he has said he discovered his rap talents freestyling in Foster Hall — 'People really started rocking with me at Virginia State' (his words, paraphrased, to The Ringer).
Class of 1975; Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit — the first African American to sit on that court.
Class of 1982; U.S. Congresswoman from Georgia, elected 2018, a national voice on gun reform.
2019 National Teacher of the Year — a Richmond educator who took the country's top teaching honor back to VSU.
Opera soprano, the first African American to get a contract from a major American opera company; Taylor-Williams Hall is named in part for her.
Class of 1942; jazz pianist, composer, and educator — 'Dr. Billy Taylor,' one of jazz's great ambassadors.
The first African American in the nation to hold a cabinet-level position in agriculture.
Top aide to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and education director for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
Class of c. 1926; one of the nation's first Black female architects, working in the International Style; designed Azurest South, now VSU's Alumni House.
Class of 1971; NFL defensive lineman for the Los Angeles Rams, later a VSU Trojans assistant coach.
Class of 2017; NFL running back, drafted out of VSU — the Trojans' pipeline to the league in the modern era.
Major League Baseball outfielder; one of VSU's big-league exports.
Class of 1963; physicist and professor at Ohio State — part of the VSU physics tradition that made the school a training ground for Black scientists.
Class of 1986; Virginia House of Delegates, 63rd district — one of VSU's legislators in Richmond.
On March 6, 1882, the Virginia legislature passed a bill chartering the Virginia Normal and Collegiate Institute. The bill was sponsored by Delegate Alfred W. Harris, a Black attorney who kept offices in Petersburg but represented Dinwiddie County in the General Assembly. That made VSU the nation's first fully state-supported four-year institution of higher learning for Black Americans — a public school born just seventeen years after slavery's end, built on a bluff across the Appomattox River from Petersburg in Ettrick, Chesterfield County.
A hostile lawsuit stalled the school's opening for nineteen months before it could admit a single student, and the doors finally opened on October 1, 1883. The man hired to lead it was John Mercer Langston, a towering figure of the era: former dean of Howard's law school, elected to Congress in 1888 as Virginia's first African-American Representative, and the great-uncle of the poet Langston Hughes. He remains the only Black man Virginia sent to Congress until 1972. His presence gave the new school instant gravity.
In the first academic year, 1883–84, the whole university was 126 students, seven faculty members — every one of them Black — one building, 33 acres, a 200-book library, and a $20,000 budget. That is the scale it started at. The contrast with today is the whole story: by the centennial year of 1982 it had grown to nearly 5,000 students, a 236-acre campus with more than 50 buildings, a 200,000-volume library, and a $31 million biennial budget. It grew by compounding on itself for a century.
In 1902 the legislature revised the charter to curtail the collegiate program and renamed the school the Virginia Normal and Industrial Institute. The message from Richmond was plain: train teachers and workers, not scholars. For two decades the college program was throttled while the school bent itself toward industrial education. The name change stuck for nearly thirty years, and the fight to win back a full college program defined the school's next generation.
In 1920 the federal land-grant program for Black students was moved from Hampton Institute — a private school that had held it since 1872 — to Virginia Normal and Industrial Institute. The transfer made VSU Virginia's public 1890 land-grant institution, with all that meant: agriculture, engineering, extension work, and a mandate to serve Black farmers and communities across the Commonwealth. That land-grant identity is still the backbone of the school — the College of Agriculture, the Randolph Farm, and the extension programs all flow from this move.
After nearly two decades of being held to industrial and normal-school work, the college program was restored in 1923. The school clawed back the right to grant real collegiate degrees, and in 1930 the legislature renamed it Virginia State College for Negroes. That 1930 name is a period artifact — blunt about the segregated order of the time — and it held for sixteen years until the school dropped the racial qualifier and became plain Virginia State College in 1946.
In 1944 a two-year branch in Norfolk was attached to the college. It grew into a four-year branch in 1956 and kept growing until 1969, when it was spun off as an independent school: Norfolk State College, today's Norfolk State University. That history still shapes the CIAA — two conference schools that were once one institution, and the meetings between them carry that family weight.
The legislature passed a law in 1979 giving the school its present name: Virginia State University. Nearly a century after the 1882 charter, the name finally caught up with what the place had become — graduate programs, a land-grant research mission, and a full university profile. Every era of the school's name is a fossil of Virginia's racial history: from 'Collegiate Institute' to 'Normal and Industrial' to 'for Negroes' to the unqualified University.
Reginald F. Lewis entered VSU on a football scholarship in 1961, and an injury ended his playing days, so he poured himself into work and study instead. He graduated in economics in 1965, joined Kappa Alpha Psi on campus, and went on to Harvard Law — the only person in Harvard's 148-year history to be admitted before applying. After practicing corporate law in New York, he bought Beatrice International Foods for $985 million in 1987, renaming it TLC Beatrice — the first Black-owned company to top $1 billion in annual sales, and himself one of America's richest men by 1993. He died of brain cancer that same year, but VSU named its College of Business for him: the Reginald F. Lewis College of Business.
In 1974 the VSU Concert Choir recorded 'The Undine Smith Moore Song Book,' the third installment in a series documenting Afro-American heritage in song. Moore was a VSU music faculty member and co-director of the Black Man in American Music Center — a Pulitzer Prize-nominated composer known as the 'Dean of Black women composers' and a Juilliard graduate. The choir even took the program to Bethel AME in Baltimore, where several VSC graduates joined in on the closing 'Evening Song.' It was the school documenting its own musical inheritance on vinyl.
The marching band had run as the 'Marching 110' through the 1960s — built under F. Nathaniel 'Pops' Gatlin and Claiborne T. Richardson — and later as the 'Sounds of Distinction' in the 1970s. In 1984 Harold J. Haughton Sr., a new director out of Jackson State, arrived with James Holden Jr. and rebuilt the band from the ground up, renaming it the 'Trojan Explosion.' Haughton led it for nineteen years, retiring in 2003 as Director of Bands Emeritus, the only director twice named CIAA Band Director of the Year. That 1984 rebirth is the origin of everything the band has done since.
On February 26, 2010, an eight-person VSU drumline performed at the White House during the executive order signing for the White House Initiative on HBCUs by President Barack Obama. It was the first time a drumline had ever performed at the White House. The moment came under Dr. Mark W. Phillips, a Petersburg native and VSU graduate who directed the band from 2003 to 2013 — an era in which the Trojan Explosion also spent nine straight years at the Honda Battle of the Bands and appeared in a French film, 'Marching Band,' in 2009. The drumline's 2010 performance is the single most famous moment in the band's history.
Virginia State reached the CIAA Football Championship Game in 2012 and lost to Winston-Salem State in a nail-biter that went down to the wire, in front of a large crowd. The Trojans were a program that could get to championship Saturday but couldn't quite close it — a frustration that ran deep with the fan base. They kept knocking, though: the Trojans returned to the championship game in 2024, falling 17–13 to rival Virginia Union.
On February 1, 2016, Makola M. Abdullah became the 14th president of Virginia State University. He came from Bethune-Cookman's provost office, by way of dean roles at Florida Memorial and Florida A&M — a Chicago native with a Howard undergrad degree and Northwestern master's and Ph.D. in civil engineering, the youngest African American ever to earn a Ph.D. in engineering at the time. He walked in with four core beliefs — God, family, the transformative power of education, and Virginia State University itself — and the decade since has been the school's biggest growth era in a generation.
In 2020, MacKenzie Scott donated $30 million to Virginia State — the second-largest single gift in the school's history at the time. The money landed during a period when HBCUs were receiving unprecedented philanthropic attention, and for a school whose entire 1883 budget was $20,000, a single $30 million gift was almost beyond scale. It funded scholarships and institutional priorities and set the stage for an even bigger gift five years later.
In February 2023 the Trojan Explosion had the busiest week in its history: the band's pep unit performed live on NBC's Today Show in Times Square, then performed for the White House Black History Month reception — the first university band ever selected for that honor, traditionally reserved for the U.S. Marine Band. It was the band's second White House invitation overall, after the 2010 drumline visit, and both came during the Dr. Taylor Whitehead era — a VSU alumnus and former Warren County High School band director who returned to VSU full-time in 2018 and became interim director in 2022.
On November 16, 2024, Virginia State met Virginia Union in the CIAA Football Championship Game, falling 17–13 in a defensive battle. The loss stung because the two schools' rivalry is one of the CIAA's defining matchups — and because the Trojans had beaten the Panthers 35–28 earlier that same season on November 9. Winning the regular-season meeting and losing the title game to the same rival is the kind of season that sits with a fan base for years.
In June 2025 VSU opened the Alfred W. Harris Academic Commons, a $120 million, roughly 175,000-square-foot building — the largest ever constructed on campus — named for the delegate who sponsored the 1882 charter. It replaced Harris Hall and Daniel Gymnasium and houses the College of Humanities and Social Sciences and the College of Education, plus classrooms, media and broadcast labs, a black box theater, six basketball courts, an elevated running track, and a six-lane competition pool. Then in October 2025, MacKenzie Scott donated another $50 million — the largest single gift in school history. The same season, U.S. News ranked VSU #11 among HBCUs for 2026, a 12-spot climb from #23, and the school earned Carnegie R2 research designation.
The fall 2026 semester opened with the new 110,000-square-foot Magnolia Residence Hall — 454 beds, the first dorm built on campus since Gateway II in 2012, and the 12th residence hall overall — to house historic enrollment growth around 5,700 students. The Trojan Explosion hit a historic membership milestone with a 20-member tuba section, sitting at No. 1 in the Division II HBCU band polls after back-to-back Band of the Year runner-up finishes in 2023 and 2024. The university's communications shop won 2026 HBCU of the Year at the inaugural Pulse Awards for its 'Greater Happens Here' brand work, and ESPN's First Take announced it would broadcast live from VSU during Homecoming on October 9, with Stephen A. Smith on campus.
For the 2026 Homecoming week, ESPN's First Take announced a live broadcast from Virginia State's campus on Friday, October 9, as part of the network's HBCU Tour — Stephen A. Smith and host Shae Cornette on the air nationally from Ettrick for two hours. VSU homecoming was already a central-Virginia institution, the week when alumni pour back into Petersburg and the Trojan Explosion gets its biggest stage. Putting the nation's loudest sports debate show on campus for it is the school's biggest media moment since the White House performances.
The central-Virginia HBCU rivalry: Richmond's Panthers against the Ettrick Trojans, about 30 miles apart, both in the CIAA. The modern era has been razor-close — VSU beat VUU 35–28 in November 2024, then lost the CIAA championship game to the Panthers 17–13 a week later, and dropped the 2025 meeting 14–3. Note: the annual game is often called the 'Capital City Classic' in fan and media usage, but that name could not be verified from a school source in this research.
A family rivalry with history: Norfolk State was VSU's own Norfolk branch until it spun off as an independent college in 1969. The two met in the 2010 Virginia Lottery Classic, and every meeting since carries the 'we used to be one school' weight. Two CIAA programs, one origin story.
Championship-level bad blood. WSSU beat VSU in the 2012 CIAA Football Championship Game in a down-to-the-wire finish, and the 'Battle of the States' 2026 meeting drew HBCU Gameday coverage framing it as rivalry week. When both are good, the CIAA title tends to run through them.
🥁 Trojan Explosion · since 1888
The Trojan Explosion is a show-style band of around 120 members with the Essence of Troy dancers, Satin Divas flag corps, and Troy Elegance twirlers. Its résumé is the strongest of any Division II HBCU band: two White House performances (the 2010 drumline, a first; the 2023 full band), a live Today Show spot, nine straight Honda Battle of the Bands runs, back-to-back Band of the Year Division II runner-up finishes in 2023 and 2024, and No. 1 in the 2026 DII HBCU band polls with a record 20-member tuba section. The band wears blue and orange at home, blue/orange/white on the road, and 'Glad' is a signature crowd piece.
Built the 'Marching 110' of the 1960s into a respected Black-college band; his nickname 'Pops' is still spoken with reverence by VSU band alumni.
Carried the Marching 110 forward with Gatlin; oversaw the band as it transitioned into the 'Sounds of Distinction' identity of the 1970s.
Arrived from Jackson State in 1984, renamed the band the Trojan Explosion, and led it nineteen years. Only director ever twice named CIAA Band Director of the Year; retired as Director of Bands Emeritus.
Petersburg native and VSU graduate. Nine straight Honda Battle of the Bands appearances; the 2010 White House drumline performance for President Obama — the first drumline ever at the White House; the band appeared in the French film 'Marching Band' (2009).
Assistant director since 1984 — Holden was there at the band's 1984 rebirth — and director of the VSU Gospel Chorale. Known nationally as an arranger and a saxophonist; kept the Explosion's sound through the 2010s.
VSU alumnus who directed Warren County High School's Dynamic Marching Machine for twenty years before returning to VSU full-time in 2018. Took the band to the 2023 Honda Battle of the Bands (10th selection), the Today Show, and the White House Black History Month program. Elected president of the HBCU Band & Orchestra Directors' Consortium.
Virginia State has a very active NPHC with all nine Divine Nine organizations represented — the university's own news celebrated its first fully in-person Divine Nine intake season since 2019, with all nine chapters taking new members. The chapters are old: Phi (Zeta Phi Beta, 1929) and Alpha Zeta (Sigma Gamma Rho, 1938) anchor nearly a century of yard history. Reginald Lewis's Kappa Alpha Psi membership is the most famous Greek tie in school history. Homecoming is the peak of yard culture — probates, step shows, and the Woo Woos-era tailgate scene draw alumni back to Ettrick in force. The music tier runs through Sigma Alpha Iota's Mu Beta, Phi Mu Alpha's Sigma Zeta, and Kappa Kappa Psi's Zeta Psi (serving the Trojan Explosion), plus Pershing Rifles and Pershing Angels drill organizations.
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The last dorm built before the 2020s growth wave. When it opened, nobody knew it would stand alone for fourteen years — VSU didn't add another bed of housing until Magnolia in 2026.
Lockett Hall, built in 1930 and named for agriculture division director John Leon Lockett, had sat vacant since 2006. A two-year, $11 million overhaul turned it into a state-of-the-art science facility for biology, nanotechnology, robotics, and chemistry — new labs, glass-wall elevator, loading dock, central HVAC, emergency generator, and distance-learning tech. A Depression-era building resurrected for 21st-century lab science.
The $120 million, roughly 175,000-square-foot Academic Commons opened in June 2025 — the largest building ever constructed on campus — replacing Harris Hall and Daniel Gymnasium. It consolidated the College of Humanities and Social Sciences and the College of Education under one roof, with media and broadcast production labs, a black box theater, ceramics studios, six basketball courts, an elevated running track, and a six-lane competition pool with diving boards. Named for Delegate Alfred W. Harris, who sponsored the 1882 charter — the founder's name finally on the flagship building.
Opened for the fall 2026 semester: a 110,000-square-foot, 454-bed residence hall in Quad II on the west side of campus — the first new dorm in fourteen years and the 12th residence hall overall. Single- and double-suites, a multipurpose assembly hall, study lounges, and dedicated student parking. Built for historic enrollment growth, with the university saying an increasing share of students now come from outside Virginia.
A $13.4 million project starting construction in fall 2026, targeting completion in summer 2027. It renovates the circa-1860 Summerseat building into an agriculture museum and adds a pavilion, outdoor kitchen, greenhouse, educational gardens, and an orchard — VSU leaning into its 1890 land-grant extension mission right at the edge of the Ettrick community.
Board-approved 60,000-square-foot center for student leadership and development, budgeted at $64.8 million in state bonds. Construction is slated to start in spring 2027 with occupancy targeted for fall 2028 — offices for wrap-around student services, an auditorium, multipurpose training and counseling space, and a commons. The next big-ticket student-life build after Magnolia.
Beyond Magnolia, the facilities plan calls for another residence hall at 454 beds, $74 million Phase I using design-build precast concrete, targeting spring 2026 occupancy per board materials. Enrollment growth is the driver — the university intends to push back toward 6,000 students.
A long-planned $84 million, 164,800-square-foot multipurpose center — 5,200 to 6,200 seats, new home for men's and women's basketball and volleyball, with arena lobby, practice gym, athletic department offices, mass communications space, and a wellness center. The case study calls it a vision two decades in the making, designed to drive the local economy and transform the greater community.
The campus master plan proposes closing University Avenue — the road cutting through the center of campus — to vehicles and converting it to a pedestrian walkway with brick pavers, lighting, and raised crosswalks, plus a 30,000-square-foot Johnston Memorial Library addition, a welcome center and alumni building at the north end, and, most ambitiously, a walking bridge across the Appomattox River into Petersburg using the abandoned railroad supports still standing. The plan also formalizes Greek plots with guidelines for unity and creativity.
VSU earned Carnegie R2 Research Designation — the high-research-activity tier for a school that spent its first century as a teaching and extension institution. It's the credential that says the land-grant research mission (Randolph Farm, the 412-acre agricultural research facility, faculty work like the bioluminescent fungi studies) has arrived at scale.
Notable faculty past and present: Undine Smith Moore, the Pulitzer-nominated composer called the 'Dean of Black women composers'; Dr. John M. Hunter, who in 1937 became the third African American to earn a Ph.D. in physics (Cornell) and built the VSU physics department from 1925; Dr. Herman Branson, the alumnus whose math cracked the alpha helix; Luther Porter Jackson, the historian who worked alongside Carter G. Woodson; Amaza Lee Meredith, who founded the Fine Arts department and designed Azurest South (now the Alumni House); Johnella Frazier Jackson, who wrote the music to the Alma Mater; and Edna Meade Colson, the education authority who trained a generation of Black teachers. NFL veteran Larry Brooks serves as an assistant coach on the Trojans football staff.
14th president since 2016; the school's biggest fundraising and building era under his watch.
Academic chief; quoted alongside Abdullah on the 2026 rankings climb, framing the mission as student success and affordable access.
VSU alumnus leading the Trojan Explosion; elected president of the HBCU Band & Orchestra Directors' Consortium.
VSU is a residential campus — nearly the entire student body lives on it — set on a bluff above the Appomattox River in Ettrick, across from Petersburg, with I-95 and I-85 meeting nearby. The student body runs about 93% Black, roughly 57% women, and heavily in-state, though the school says students are increasingly arriving from across the country. There are more than 70 student organizations, The Statesman as the student newspaper, and a culture that orbits football Saturdays and homecoming. The 2026 communications awards ('Greater Happens Here') were built on exactly this: a campus that photographs and sounds like a classic HBCU, and knows it.