Wilberforce, Ohio · Founded 1856 · Bulldogs
“The oldest private HBCU in America — founded before the Civil War, bought outright by the AME Church in 1863, and Black-owned and operated ever since.”
Then-president Elfred Pinkard on The Breakfast Club telling the Wilberforce founding story — the AME Church buying the school outright and building Black-owned education — to a national audience. Ties directly to the founding timeline beat.
Full 2026 showcase set — Gap Band to 2Pac to Boosie — showing how far the Hounds of Sound have come in five years. Tied to the 2021 band-founding timeline entry.
The 2nd Annual Hounds of Sound High School Band Day — the young band doing recruitment the HBCU way, hosting high school players on campus.
Street performance — the band as the school's public face in the community, marching the way they do without a football team.
Battle of the bands against Talladega's Marching Tornadoes — the new kid holding its own in the HBCU band circuit.
Short history piece on the school's 1856 founding as the first college owned and operated by Black Americans. Ties to the founding timeline beat.
From the Yard's video feed.
From the Yard's video feed.
Wilberforce class of 1929; the NASA mathematician portrayed in Hidden Figures — the first Black woman to supervise a group of staff at NASA.
The 'Dean of Afro-American Composers'; the first Black composer to conduct a major U.S. orchestra and to have an opera broadcast on national television.
Opera singer and the first Black prima donna of the Metropolitan Opera.
The highest-ranking Black woman in the U.S. Army during World War II; commanding officer of the first battalion of Black women sent overseas.
Medal of Honor recipient for extraordinary heroism on December 26, 1944, near Sommocolonia, Italy.
Labor leader and civil rights organizer.
Class of 1873; educator, writer, and activist — a leading figure in the women's suffrage and civil rights fights.
The first Black mayor of Dayton, Ohio, and its longest-serving.
Jazz saxophonist and one of the great tenor voices of the swing era.
Saxophonist and composer with the Count Basie Orchestra.
Jazz composer and theorist.
Blues musician.
Jazz and rhythm-and-blues bandleader, singer, pianist, and drummer.
U.S. Congressman from New York who returned to serve as Wilberforce's president from 2002 to 2008.
Class of 2022; U.S. Congresswoman from Ohio.
Class of 1924; College Football Hall of Fame coach who led Southern University football from 1936 to 1961.
Owner and designer of Clearview Golf Club — the first integrated golf course in America, designed and owned by a Black man.
Pioneering civil rights activist.
Class of 1928; the twelfth Black American to earn a Ph.D. in mathematics and the first Black faculty member at Oberlin College.
The first Black woman to serve as Majority Whip of the New York City Council.
The Cincinnati Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, working with the African Methodist Episcopal Church, bought 52 acres of the old Tawawa Springs pleasure resort near Xenia, Ohio for $15,000. Tawawa is Shawnee for 'bath of gold,' after the minerals glinting in the stream rocks — and the church spent another $50,000 turning the resort's buildings, including a 200-room hotel, into classrooms. Uriah Heath proposed naming the school after British abolitionist William Wilberforce; the name was adopted August 26, 1856, replacing the working title 'Ohio African University' — the founders called choosing the word 'University' a 'pledge of victorious faith.' The school was incorporated August 30, 1856, opened that October, and from day one admitted both men and women with a multiracial, multi-denominational board that included future Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase.
Wilberforce awarded its first diplomas in 1857, becoming the first historically Black college to graduate students with an accredited bachelor's degree. No other HBC matched that until Lincoln University awarded its first bachelor's diplomas in 1868. In its early years the school ran two tracks — a college preparatory program and a collegiate program aimed at training teachers — and drew two kinds of students: free Black youth from Ohio, Pennsylvania, and California, and the mixed-race children of Southern planters who sent them north for the education denied them at home. By 1860 the private university had more than 200 students.
The board elected Richard S. Rust of the MEC's New Hampshire Conference as the school's first elected president on June 30, 1858, replacing interim appointee John F. Wright. Rust's term began under siege: the sudden influx of Black families into Xenia alarmed white residents, several Ohio newspapers ran identical 1858 pieces complaining about how life in Xenia had changed, and a formal petition was sent to the MEC Cincinnati Conference demanding the school be moved. The board refused. Rust steered the school until its Civil War suspension, leaving the presidency in 1862 as finances collapsed.
Sarah Jane Woodson, an 1856 Oberlin graduate and sister of original trustee Lewis Woodson, began teaching at Wilberforce — the first Black American to teach at a historically Black college. Most of the early faculty were Oberlin graduates or products of other Northern abolitionist schools; Woodson's arrival gave the school its first Black instructor. She left during the wartime closure and returned in 1866 in a bigger role, teaching English and Latin.
The Civil War killed Wilberforce's finances: Southern planters who sent their mixed-race children north withdrew them, and the board suspended operations June 19, 1862. At a board meeting on March 10, 1863, AME Bishop Daniel A. Payne bought the school and all its assets for $10,000 — with a $2,500 down payment and the contract signed June 11, 1863 — and the AME Church sold another property to pay off the school's debts. It reopened in early July 1863 with just six students, as the first Black-owned and operated college in the country. Payne became the first African American to lead a university in the United States.
On April 14, 1865 — the night Abraham Lincoln was assassinated — arsonists set fire to the main college building while students and faculty were in Xenia celebrating the fall of the Confederacy. Valued at $60,000 and insured for only $8,000, the building housed every classroom, the dining hall, lecture hall, offices, and dormitory space for men and women. The university refused to fold: classes ran from a cottage building for the rest of the year, and Payne went to his network — Salmon P. Chase and Pittsburgh's Charles Avery each gave $10,000, Mary E. Monroe gave $4,200 — to rebuild. The school's finances were never abundant, but it persevered.
Payne established theology and classics departments in 1866, added science in 1867 (including medical science instruction), and opened a Normal school in 1872 that began graduating Black teachers for public schools serving Black children in the 1870s. His curriculum ran on two prongs — religion and culture — with students required at chapel services and religion classes twice daily. Church-state tensions later forced the theology arm out: it began teaching as Payne Theological Seminary in 1891 and was officially incorporated as a separate institution on June 19, 1894.
President Benjamin F. Lee founded a touring school choir, the Wilberforce Concert Company, in 1881 — modeled directly on the Fisk Jubilee Singers, whose 1871 debut had proven touring choirs could keep a Black college alive. Lee's choir never raised much money, but it won a reputation for musicianship that drew students from a wider geographic area and diversified the student body. It toured until it was disbanded in 1887. The experiment was Wilberforce's first taste of music as an ambassador — a forerunner of the Hounds of Sound a century and a half later.
AME Bishop Benjamin W. Arnett, also an Ohio politician, got the state legislature to fund Wilberforce and create the Combined Normal and Industrial Department (CNI) — a law passed with bipartisan support on March 19, 1887. The catch: the governor of Ohio appointed five of the department's nine board seats, leaving the AME Church a minority on its own campus. The school became part private, part state-funded — an arrangement that bred 60 years of board friction and eventually split the institution in two. The near-term payoff was real: tens of thousands of dollars in annual state aid, and each state legislator could award an annual scholarship that brought hundreds of Black students to campus.
After Lt. John Hanks Alexander, the program's first instructor, died suddenly, Wilberforce president Samuel T. Mitchell petitioned President Cleveland and got Charles Young — then the only Black officer in the U.S. Army and the third Black graduate of West Point — assigned to campus. Young built the nation's first Black ROTC program from nothing, taught French, chemistry, geometry, and geology alongside military science, befriended lecturer W.E.B. Du Bois, and formed the university's first marching band. His house near campus is now a National Historic Landmark. The era's reach was global: an 1898 AME report counted 20 faculty, 334 students, and 246 graduates, with students from Haiti, South Africa, South America, Canada, Mexico, the British West Indies, and Bermuda.
President Joshua H. Jones — an 1887 Wilberforce graduate turned wealthy businessman — put university money into farms for income and launched the campus's first great building boom. Howells Hall, home of the printing department, was completed in 1900; a second women's dormitory, Arnett Hall, followed in 1905; then Galloway Hall and Poindexter Hall in 1906, the latter holding carpentry and drawing classrooms. Andrew Carnegie funded a library built in 1906–07 and dedicated in June 1907 — the building now on the National Register of Historic Places. Popular with faculty and students, Jones tried to consolidate power over the school's three divisions and was dismissed by the board in June 1908.
Under president William S. Scarborough (1908–1920), a classicist born into slavery who wrote the standard Greek textbook, enrollment grew from 400 to 1,542, the faculty doubled, and debt was cut to $25,000. Scarborough — a WU classics professor for 31 years before the presidency — leveraged his scholarly standing to pull in donations and revised the curriculum to Carnegie Foundation standards. In WWI the whole university offered itself to the war effort: President Wilson and Ohio's governor personally thanked the school, Scarborough served as a federal food commissioner, and 400 soldiers trained in an Army Training Corps camp on campus. Carnegie money built Kezia Emery Hall (1913) and the library during his watch.
After a failed 1935 inspection (faulty labs, library, and administration) and a 1938 rejection by the Ohio College Association, Wilberforce finally won provisional accreditation from the North Central Association. The 1935–36 renovation and expansion of the Carnegie Library helped make the case. The same year, the Gillespie Bill cut AME seats on the state-funded department's board — a sign of how bitter the church/state fight had become.
When the AME board fired president Charles H. Wesley on June 9, 1947, the state board called it a 'breach of agreement' and sued. Courts upheld the firing but let the state pull its College of Education and Industrial Arts out of Wilberforce. On September 9, 1947 it became its own college — Wesley as its first president for two decades — renamed Central State College in 1951 and Central State University in 1965. Wesley's parting gift to the old school was substantial: he ended the church/state faculty pay disparity, won a $1 million state grant that renovated the cafeteria and water supply, and got Wilberforce into the Inter-University Council of Ohio in 1944. Wilberforce went back to being fully private.
Wilberforce made cooperative education central: most students complete internships in their field alongside coursework. It has been part of the curriculum since 1966 — President Rembert E. Stokes initiated the program in 1964 — and is the school's defining academic signature. For a tiny private HBCU, it's the feature that separates Wilberforce: students leave campus and come back with real work experience.
The 1974 Super Outbreak tornado that flattened Xenia also devastated Wilberforce's old campus — an F5 that hit the city directly. The university had already begun building a new campus a mile away in 1967, which is what stands today. Survivors of the old grounds include the Carnegie Library (1907, now on the National Register of Historic Places), Shorter Hall (rebuilt after a 1922 fire), and the Charles Leander Hill Gymnasium (1958). In the 1970s the university also established the National Afro-American Museum and Cultural Center, now operated by the Ohio Historical Society.
In 2008 the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Inspector General finished an audit of the school's handling of Title IV funds — covering the 2004–05 and 2005–06 work-study program years — and found numerous faults. The auditors blamed administrative problems: staff turnover, too little financial-aid staff, no written procedures, and poor communication between offices. The university worked with auditors to set up appropriate staff and procedures. It was the first public crack in a financial crisis that would nearly close the school a decade later.
Elfred Anthony Pinkard took office in March 2018; by June the Higher Learning Commission had placed Wilberforce on probation over its financial management. The school stayed accredited, but it was in jeopardy of losing its status if it didn't fix the books. Pinkard — who would take the founding story to a national audience on The Breakfast Club — steadied the institution through the probation years.
After a years-long hiatus, Wilberforce rebuilt its music program from scratch — new music department chair James McLeod, assistant professor Virgil Goodwine charged with the marching band — and fielded the Hounds of Sound, the first official marching band in the university's 165-year history. The 147-member band's first full season took it to the Mardi Gras parade in New Orleans in February 2023 and the Cincinnati Reds' Opening Day Parade on March 30, 2023. The same year the university announced a 15% tuition cut for Ohio residents — survival through renewal: cheaper to attend, louder than ever.
The Bulldogs moved to the HBCU Athletic Conference for the 2024–25 season, putting Wilberforce in a league built for schools like itself. The road there was long: NAIA Independent runs, a stint in the Mid-South Conference in 2022–23, and the defunct American Mideast Conference from 1999 to 2012. With no football team, basketball carries the banner at the Gaston F. Lewis Arena — alongside baseball, cross country, golf, track and field, women's gymnastics and volleyball.
The Hounds of Sound appeared in the official music video for GloRilla's 'MARCH' — released December 5, 2025 and past a million YouTube views — with band members helping shape the choreography and a fake-tryout scene where Glo herself grabbed drumsticks. Director Virgil Goodwine called it 'a cultural stamp': a four-year-old band on the national stage. The same year Wilberforce became the first HBCU ever sponsored by AND1 — $100,000 in gear for the basketball programs.
The Divine Nine's Greek Roundup Challenge raised a record $62,890.56 toward building new student dormitories — AKA took the crown with $16,056. The Greeks have become Wilberforce's most reliable builders: Greek Day basketball games pack the Gaston F. Lewis Arena, and the fundraiser money goes straight into housing the next class. For a school that has burned down, split in two, and been leveled by a tornado, the dorms are the latest chapter of Suo Marte — by one's own toil.
The rivalry was born in the 1947 Split, when the state-funded department walked out of Wilberforce and became what is now Central State — leaving two HBCUs on opposite sides of the street in the same small Ohio town. With Wilberforce fielding no football team, basketball carries the grudge: HBCU Buzz called Central State's 83-61 win over 'longtime rival and across the street neighbor Wilberforce,' while the Bulldogs took a 103-101 overtime thriller at Central State on November 15, 2023. Games at the Gaston F. Lewis Arena and Beacom-Lewis Gym are the town's biggest nights.
An emerging rivalry fought on two fronts. On the band field, the Hounds of Sound met Talladega's Marching Tornadoes in the Big HBCU Southern Classic Battle of the Bands in 2026 — the new kid holding its own in the HBCU band circuit. On the court, Wilberforce edged Talladega 83-81 in HBCUAC play at the Gaston F. Lewis Arena in February 2026, with Daiquan Coach's free throws sealing it in the final ten seconds.
🥁 Hounds of Sound Marching Band · since 2021
Wilberforce is the rare HBCU whose marching band is brand new: the Hounds of Sound are the first official marching band in the school's 165+ year history, formed in 2021. With no football team, they march at home basketball games, parades, and guest performances — the band is the school's loudest ambassador. They marched the Mardi Gras parade and the Cincinnati Reds' Opening Day Parade (2023), appeared in GloRilla's 'MARCH' video (2025), and hold an annual High School Band Day. Goodwine also runs the concert band, jazz band, winter drumline, percussion ensemble, and the university recording studio.
Army officer who formed the university's first marching band while building the first Black ROTC program; precursor to the modern band
Veteran program-builder hired as the new music department chair; redesigned the curriculum and got the band back on the field
Director of Bands / Director of Instrumental Music and Ensembles; Dayton native, Pearl/Adams artist, Omega Psi Phi; took the band from zero to GloRilla's 'MARCH' video (released Dec 5, 2025, past a million YouTube views) in four years
Director of vocal music and ensembles; resurrected the choir from Wilberforce's once-thriving music history
All nine Divine Nine organizations are chartered on campus — the Greeks run the show at Greek Day basketball games inside the Gaston F. Lewis Arena. Wilberforce also has a unique place in Black Greek history: Gamma Phi, a collegiate fraternity founded at Wilberforce on March 1, 1905, predates Alpha Phi Alpha (1906) and lasted into the 1940s. The campus's oldest D9 chapters are historic: Beta was Delta Sigma Theta's second chapter ever (February 5, 1914), and Kappa was Sigma Gamma Rho's early chapter (1923). The Greeks are deeply tied to the school's wallet: in 2026 the Divine Nine raised a record $62,890.56 in the annual Greek Roundup Challenge — AKA won it with $16,056 — all going to fund new student dormitories.
Still digging this up — check back soon.
Built with Carnegie matching funds; now on the National Register of Historic Places (added 2004) — one of the surviving buildings from the original campus.
First women's dormitory, completed in 1890.
Second women's dormitory, completed during the Joshua Jones-era building boom.
Opened 1906 with a large auditorium for the school while also serving as a trades building.
Third women's dormitory, built during the Scarborough-era expansion.
Women's dormitory funded mainly by Miss E. J. Emery and Andrew Carnegie, named for Emery's mother.
State-built hospital on campus serving students and training nurses in the Normal and Industrial department.
Built by the state-funded division to relieve dorm crowding and house CNI administration.
Burned to the ground December 7, 1922, displacing 200 men; rebuilt bigger. President Gregg also bought and converted the Tawawa Hotel and Griffin House into dorms so the school could house ~1,000 students.
New power plant completed on campus during the Gilbert Jones presidency.
Gymnasium named for the post-Split president; basketball now plays at the Gaston F. Lewis Arena.
New campus constructed one mile from the original — the campus students live on today.
The F5 tornado of the 1974 Super Outbreak leveled much of the old campus; the 1967 new campus survived and became the permanent home.
The Divine Nine's Greek Roundup Challenge raised a record $62,890.56 toward building new student dormitories.
Provost unverified — omitted rather than guessed. Notable figures who taught here: W.E.B. Du Bois (Greek and Latin, 1894–96), Charles Young (military science), Brig. Gen. Benjamin O. Davis Sr. (military science). Past basketball coaches include Kevin Waters and Mark Mitchell (2020–2024; father of WNBA guard Kelsey Mitchell).
In office since 2023
Listed in the 2017–2019 university catalog; current AD status unverified — check wilberforcebulldogs.com
Quoted as head coach in 2025–26 season coverage on wilberforcebulldogs.com
Led the women's program through the AND1 sponsorship rollout
Runs all instrumental ensembles and the recording studio
Built the music department revival
It's tiny — around 600 students on a rural campus near Xenia, Ohio — and that shapes everything: everybody knows everybody. The band and the Greeks are the social engine; there is no football team, so basketball and the Hounds of Sound carry school spirit. The co-op program (since 1966) means most students leave campus for real internships, which is unusual for a small private HBCU. The school's survival instinct is part of the identity — fires, tornadoes, show-cause threats, and financial crunches — and students tend to carry that 'Suo Marte' pride about doing it by their own toil.