Marshall, Texas · Founded 1873 · Wiley the Wildcat
“The little Marshall, Texas school that sent its debate team to beat the nation's best in 1935 — home of the Great Debaters, and still punching above its weight.”
KTBS segment on how the 1935 debate legacy still shapes Wiley nearly two decades after the film — the school's own telling of its central story.
Live recording of the spiritual the choir cut for Nate Parker's Birth of a Nation soundtrack (Atlantic Records), soloist Lewis Keys '12 — the performance that put Wiley's choir on a Hollywood soundtrack.
The official Atlantic Records release of the choir's track from the Birth of a Nation inspired-by album.
The choir under Dr. Gregory McPherson — the ensemble that carried Wiley's music worldwide during the band's 50-year silence.
The choir ministering at the 29th Annual Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration in Junction City, Kansas — typical of their national touring circuit.
Full recent concert from the 'Purple & White A Cappella Express Tour 2026' — the choir in its current university-era form.
The A Cappella Choir's viral-style social moment — proof the choir lives on student phones as well as in chapels.
The film's soundtrack cut of the Wiley choir's session recording, tying the school to the Nat Turner story on screen.
The relaunched Marching Grandioso-era band in performance — the first generation of Wiley marching musicians in 50 years.
Day-in-the-life campus piece with the longtime choir conductor — a ground-level look at Wiley's Marshall campus.
Earlier campus documentary on student life at Wiley — the school as students see it.
Documentary framing of Wiley as a blueprint for the Black liberal arts tradition — the school's institutional self-portrait.
Class of 1938 — co-founder of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in 1942, national director 1961–66, one of the 'Big Four' civil rights leaders alongside MLK, Roy Wilkins, and Whitney Young; organized the Freedom Rides.
Class of 1934 — plaintiff in Sweatt v. Painter (1950), the Supreme Court case that desegregated the University of Texas Law School; helped found Texas Southern University.
The 'Grandmother of Juneteenth,' whose decades of advocacy led to Juneteenth becoming a federal holiday; Wiley honors her in its social-good mission.
Class of 1934 — astrophysicist who worked on Project Diana with the U.S. Army Signal Corps, the first successful moon-radar experiment.
Class of 1934 — noted chemist and college professor.
First female member of the legendary 1935 debate team; became an educator (Hobart Jarrett cited alongside her among Wiley's education leaders).
Class of 1933 — internationally renowned concert pianist.
First successful Black fashion model in Paris.
African American golfer who challenged the PGA's segregationist policies.
Class of 1961 — jazz musician and educator in Houston.
Class of 1945 — actor, director, and educator.
Class of 1941 — first African American to teach in the Seattle Public Schools.
Physician; transferred to Mississippi State after sophomore year at Wiley to become the first African American to matriculate at MSU.
Civil rights leader who fought the white primary in Texas.
Louisiana House of Representatives, 1992–1996; retired Shreveport dentist.
Tuskegee Airman.
Class of 1980 — NFL player, one of five Wiley Wildcats to reach the league.
Minister, former U.S. Ambassador to Liberia, founder of the Maryland Industrial and Agricultural Institute for Colored Youths.
Class of 1899 — organized Wiley's first male quartet, first brass band, and first football team; later started the first teacher-training school for African Americans in Louisiana.
Class of 1904 — New Jersey lawyer, politician, and civil rights advocate.
Less than eight years after the last Civil War hostilities ended, the Freedmen's Aid Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church founded Wiley University just south of Marshall, Texas, so that Black youth could pursue higher learning in the arts, sciences, and the professions. The school was named for Bishop Isaac William Wiley — born in Lewistown, Pennsylvania in 1825, a medical and educational missionary to China, elected bishop in 1864, who organized a Methodist conference in Japan. It opened its doors in a climate of Jim Crow violence and intimidation, with two frame buildings and what the school's own history calls 'an overwhelming desire to succeed.' From the start it was the first Black college west of the Mississippi River.
Rather than move Wiley farther out of town, the founders moved the college closer to Marshall, onto 55 acres of wooded land where the campus still stands today. Land was cleared and four additional buildings went up as enrollment soared to 160 students with seven full-time faculty. The original campus site in south Marshall lives on as the Wiley College Cemetery.
Wiley was formally chartered in 1882. In those early years it operated as both a college and a high school — the high school would not be dropped until 1929. For the institution's first twenty years the president and the entire faculty and staff were white church missionaries, an all-white staffing policy that stood until 1893.
Henry B. Pemberton was awarded the B.A. degree, becoming Wiley's first college graduate. Pemberton stayed and became a mathematics professor at the school; his son Charles Pemberton later became one of Houston's outstanding physicians. The first generation of Wiley graduates set a pattern the school is still known for: sending Black professionals out into a hostile South.
Isaiah B. Scott was named president, the first African American to hold the post, and with his election he changed the institution's policy regarding the race of faculty and staff — ending the all-white missionary staffing era. Scott served three years before the church called him away to become editor of the Southwestern Christian Advocate. His short tenure remade Wiley into a school run by and for Black people.
Matthew W. Dogan Sr. — born to formerly enslaved parents in Mississippi, a mathematics professor recommended for the job by Bishop J. C. Hartzell of the Freedmen's Aid Society — took the presidency in 1896 and held it until 1942. Under Dogan, Wiley became one of the best African American colleges in the United States. He oversaw five new buildings plus a Carnegie library, expanded enrollment and course offerings, added a Ph.D. program and law, nursing, and theology degrees, and led the school through Southern Association accreditation. He retired as president emeritus in 1942 after 46 years and was known nationally as the 'Dean of Negro education.'
A fire in 1906 destroyed five of the eleven buildings on campus — but they were rebuilt, and the rebuilding turned into legend. President Dogan secured a grant from the Carnegie Foundation with no matching funds required, an unusual concession, and the president's home and the new library were built by Wiley students themselves in 1907. The Carnegie library was open to the entire Marshall community and remained the only public library in town until 1974.
Wiley became a founding member of the Southwestern Athletic Conference in 1920, a conference created in part by Wiley's own people. In 1923 Fred Thomas 'Pop' Long — a former Negro leagues outfielder with the Detroit Stars and Indianapolis ABCs — took over the football program. Long would coach Wiley football for 35 years across two stints (1923–1947 and 1956–1965), compiling a record that made Wiley a Black college football power for four decades.
Melvin Beaunorus Tolson, a Lincoln University honors graduate who had just married Ruth Southall, moved to Marshall to teach speech and English at Wiley. Tolson — already writing poetry — would do far more than teach: he coached the junior varsity football team, directed the theater club, co-founded the black intercollegiate Southern Association of Dramatic and Speech Arts, and organized the Wiley Forensic Society. His students in those years included James L. Farmer Jr. and Heman Sweatt, who would become giants of the civil rights movement.
Fred 'Pop' Long organized the State Fair Classic football game at the Cotton Bowl in Dallas during 'Negro Day' at the Texas State Fair. From 1925 to 1929 Wiley played Oklahoma's Langston University in the Classic; from 1930 to 1948 the opponent was Prairie View A&M. The Classic became one of Black college football's signature annual events.
Wiley won the first of three Black college football national championships under Fred Long. Long's Wiley teams won five SWAC titles in the 1920s alone, and over his career collected 12 SWAC championships and national crowns in 1928, 1932, and 1945. Wiley and Prairie View A&M each won five national championships between 1921 and 1964 — more than any other Black Texas schools of the era.
The institution dropped its high school and all industrial classes and renamed itself Wiley College, the name it would carry for nearly a century. The change marked the school's full commitment to liberal arts college work. It also closed out the era when Wiley was trying to be everything — elementary, secondary, industrial, and collegiate — for East Texas Black families.
Tolson's debate team broke the color bar when it became the first Black college team to debate a white college, taking on Oklahoma City University. Because no white Southern campus would host the match, it was held at Avery Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Oklahoma City — the first interracial collegiate debate in the Southern United States. On the gridiron, Long's Wildcats won their second Black college national championship.
Under President Dogan and Dean Vattel Daniel, Wiley became the first historically Black college in Texas to receive an 'A' rating from the Southern Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools. The all-white SACS made it clear Wiley should not consider itself a member — the rating without the recognition, a perfect emblem of the Jim Crow era.
The crowning achievement of Tolson's debate program came in 1935, when Wiley defeated the reigning national debate champions, the University of Southern California, before an audience of 1,100 people in California. It capped a decade in which Tolson's teams won 74 of 75 debates, defeating white and Black schools alike across the Jim Crow South and the country. Under segregation, Black students almost never met elite white schools in competition — the victory symbolized progress and equality on a national stage. Henrietta Bell Wells, the team's first female member, was part of the program's legend; the saga became the 2007 film The Great Debaters, in which the opponent was fictionalized as Harvard.
After 46 years, Matthew W. Dogan retired as president emeritus, handing the school to Egbert C. McLeod. Dogan left behind a fully accredited, nationally respected institution — five new buildings, a Carnegie library, graduate and professional programs, and the debate and football traditions that defined Wiley's name. The Dogan era remains the longest presidency in the school's history.
Under Fred Long, Wiley won its third Black college football national championship. The Wildcats remained a SWAC power through the 1940s and 1950s — Long's teams won conference titles in 1944 and 1945 and again in 1956 and 1957, the latter ending with a 10–0–1 season and a 78–20 Aztec Bowl victory over the Mexico Military Academy.
Julius Sebastian Scott Sr. became president in 1948 and led the school for a decade, through the postwar enrollment waves and the early civil rights years. The Julius S. Scott Sr. Chapel — later the site of Wiley's 2012 rematch debate with USC — was eventually named in his honor.
Wiley students, together with students from nearby Bishop College, launched the first sit-ins in Texas in the rotunda of the Old Harrison County Courthouse to protest segregation in public facilities. The Marshall News Messenger later documented that in March and April of 1960 they staged what became the largest sit-in in Texas — though it lasted only four days, the publicity was so great that the Texas State Senate's Permanent Investigating Committee sent a representative to Marshall to look for Communist influence. None was found, and all charges against the student marchers were dismissed.
Wiley's football program played its final season in 1968, going 2–8 under third-year coach Bob Moorman in the SWAC. The Wildcats had left the conference after that season, and the gridiron tradition built by Fred Long — three national championships, a dozen conference titles, five NFL players over the years — came to an end. Football has never been reinstated; the school competes today without it.
Wiley's marching band went inactive after the 1972–73 school year, ending a tradition that stretched back to R. E. Brown's first brass band in 1899. The band would stay dark for half a century. During the silence, Wiley's music kept its national name alive through the A Cappella Choir, which toured, recorded, and went viral long before the band's return.
Tony Scherman's article about the Wiley debate team in the Spring 1997 issue of American Legacy magazine sparked a renewed national interest in the 1935 story. The article became the seed of the 2005 AMS Pictures documentary 'The Great Debaters: The Real Great Debaters of Wiley College' and then of the 2007 dramatic film — the moment Wiley's greatest chapter stopped being a fading memory and became a national inheritance.
Haywood L. Strickland — a Stillman College graduate who had rescued Texas College from the loss of accreditation — became Wiley's 16th president in 2000. Over 18 years he grew enrollment from the low hundreds past 1,000, got SACSCOC accreditation reaffirmed to 2023 with no recommendations, won specialized business accreditation, and rebuilt the physical plant: the $2.4-million Julius S. Scott Sr. Chapel and the $14-million, 500-bed residence center that now bears his name (opened 2012).
The Great Debaters, directed by and starring Denzel Washington as Melvin B. Tolson and produced by Oprah Winfrey, premiered Christmas Day 2007. Washington announced a $1 million donation to re-establish Wiley's debate team — now called the Melvin B. Tolson/Denzel Washington Forensics Society. The film's production refurbished the administration building and landscaped the campus, and in its wake enrollment roughly doubled, passing 900 for the first time in at least 40 years after a 2006 year when professors had accepted unpaid furloughs and the college ran a $1-million deficit. The Congressional Record (Rep. Louie Gohmert, Oct. 2013) notes the real 1935 opponent was USC, fictionalized as Harvard in the film.
On January 27, 2012, Wiley's debate team hosted the University of Southern California in an exhibition match at the Julius S. Scott Sr. Chapel — the first meeting of the two schools since 1935. Both teams were declared victors, and they committed to another match at USC, which took place in October 2013. Wiley was nationally ranked fourth by then, having amassed 82 national awards in the 2012–13 season.
Wiley's 23-person debate team won first place at the Pi Kappa Delta Comprehensive National Tournament — the largest Pi Kappa Delta tournament in its 101-year history, and the first national speech and debate title ever won by an HBCU. The same year, the A Cappella Choir traveled to Hiroshima, Japan for the IAMSCU conference on 'Peace, Reconciliation, and Human Rights,' performing concerts and gospel workshops for Japanese children — one of the choir's many international tours.
Under artistic director Stephen L. Hayes, the A Cappella Choir spent two days in November 2015 in Wiley's chapel recording scene and atmospheric music for Nate Parker's directorial debut, The Birth of a Nation — including the haunting spiritual 'I Couldn't Hear Nobody Pray,' featuring Wiley alumnus Lewis Keys '12. The soundtrack was released by Atlantic Records. A UNCF profile notes the choir spent the better part of a century building the reputation that made the call come.
Wiley led the establishment of the first HBCU National Speech and Debate League, and in 2018 hosted the first-ever HBCU National Speech and Debate Championship Tournament. The school that once had to borrow a church to debate a white college was now convening the HBCU debate world on its own campus.
Wiley installed a 123-kilowatt solar array on campus, expected to provide up to 20% of the college's electricity. The same year Haywood Strickland retired after 18 years and Herman J. Felton Jr. took the presidency — installed as the 17th president in March 2019.
Wiley left the Red River Athletic Conference — which it had helped found in 1998 — to join the Gulf Coast Athletic Conference, becoming the first Texas school in a conference of all HBCUs (Dillard, Fisk, Philander Smith, Rust, Tougaloo, Oakwood, SUNO). The GCAC has since been renamed the HBCU Athletic Conference. The same year, the marching band returned after a 50-year absence under Emmanuel Scales, the Music Department chair and Director of Music Ensembles, with a goal of 125 members and band scholarships offered.
On November 3, 2023, during the 'Returning To Our Roots' homecoming celebration, President Felton announced the school would become Wiley University again — the name it held from 1873 to 1929. The change came with three new online-focused graduate programs: an MBA, a Master of Arts in Criminal Justice, and a Master of Science in Higher Education Administration, launching in 2024. The same homecoming brought a generous gift that wiped out student debt. 'We stand proudly today and return to our roots,' Felton told the students, 'symbolically as Wiley University, and literally as we embrace the next chapter of excellence.'
The university's 2024 relaunch was physical as well as nominal: the iWiley Digital Learning Initiative put an Apple iPad bundle (iPad, Magic Keyboard Folio, Apple Pencil) in every student's hands; softball joined the athletic program; residence halls got extensive renovations; and the band program formally relaunched as the Marching Grandioso. The fall semester opened August 5, 2024 with 300–400 new students moving in.
The deepest rivalry in Wiley history was with the other Black college in Marshall itself. The annual Bishop–Wiley football game was a town-dividing event — a 1927 meeting at Wiley Field ended in a scoreless tie that made the Marshall papers, and December 1940 saw Bishop win a 6–3 grid battle at Fair Park Stadium before 5,000. The schools were rivals on the field and allies in the streets: in 1960 Wiley and Bishop students together launched the first sit-ins in Texas. Bishop College closed in 1988, but the rivalry is the one old Wiley people still talk about.
Tyler's Texas College is Wiley's nearest HBCU neighbor and the living rival. The football series ran hot for decades — Wiley blanked Texas College 64–0 at Wiley Field in 1927; the teams tied in 1940; and the annual late-November meeting (often Thanksgiving week at Steer Stadium or Wildcat Stadium, with homecoming woven in some years) was the season-ender that mattered most in East Texas.
From 1930 to 1948 Wiley met Prairie View A&M at the Cotton Bowl in Dallas on 'Negro Day' at the Texas State Fair — Fred Long's own creation, and one of Black college football's signature annual events. The two schools are tied as the winningest Black Texas programs of the 1921–1964 era, five national championships apiece, and the Classic was where that supremacy got argued every October.
Not a sports rivalry but the most famous one Wiley has: the 1935 debate against the reigning national champions, reenacted as an exhibition at the Julius S. Scott Sr. Chapel on January 27, 2012 — 77 years to the date — with both teams declared victors, then again at USC in October 2013. The Congressional Record memorializes the exchange as a celebration of critical thinking and a living history lesson.
🥁 Marching Grandioso · since 2022
Wiley's band history runs deep — R. E. Brown (class of 1899) organized the school's first brass band — but the marching band went dark after 1973 and stayed dark for half a century. During the silence, the A Cappella Choir carried Wiley's musical name worldwide: recording the Birth of a Nation soundtrack, touring Japan, and collecting viral gospel moments. The relaunched Marching Grandioso, announced in 2024 as part of the university relaunch, is building the HBCU band culture from scratch on a 50-year-old foundation.
Music Department chair and Director of Music Ensembles who rebuilt the band from zero after a 50-year absence. His public goal: 125 members, with band scholarships offered to recruits.
Wiley is a founder of Black Greek life in the Southwest — the university's own handbook calls it a leader in planting the seeds of the first social organizations in the Southwest, and the roster reads like a museum: Phi Beta Sigma's Beta chapter (1915, the second Sigma chapter founded in the United States), Omega Psi Phi's Theta (1922), Zeta Phi Beta's Theta (1923), Alpha Kappa Alpha's Phi (1924), Alpha Phi Alpha's Alpha Sigma (1925), Delta Sigma Theta's Alpha Iota (1930), and Kappa Alpha Psi's Alpha Chi (1935). The Divine Nine remains central to Wiley's calendar — the school runs a Divine Nine Give Back Challenge fundraising competition ahead of homecoming and an NPHC Step Show is a headlining homecoming event.
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After the 1906 fire destroyed five of eleven buildings, President Dogan secured a Carnegie Foundation grant with no matching funds required — an unusual concession. Students themselves built the president's home and the new library. The Carnegie was open to all of Marshall and served as the town's only public library until 1974.
Built under the Dogan presidency — the first of five buildings added in his era, constructed by students who also made the bricks. It anchored the campus as the school committed fully to collegiate work.
The moviemakers behind The Great Debaters refurbished the administration building and landscaped the campus with new greenery — the administration building got a full face lift, and the grounds were manicured for filming.
A $2.4-million chapel built under President Strickland, named for the 1948–1958 president. It has become the spiritual and ceremonial heart of campus — the 2012 Wiley-USC debate rematch was staged there, and homecoming opening worship services are held there.
A $13–14 million, 500-bed student housing facility — 110,655 square feet, three stories, built by SIKON Construction for developer Student Suites. Named in honor of the president who made it happen, it opened in 2012 and remains the flagship residence hall.
Wiley installed a 123-kW solar array on campus, expected to provide up to 20% of the college's electricity needs — part of a campus-wide sustainability push that included recycling, energy-efficient lighting, and a composting program fed by the dining hall.
Extensive renovations across key campus residence halls to create more modern, welcoming living and learning environments, completed ahead of the fall 2024 semester as part of the university relaunch.
Every student received an iWiley Technology Bundle — an Apple iPad (10th Gen), Magic Keyboard Folio, and Apple Pencil — aimed at closing the digital divide and modernizing learning across all programs.
Wiley's legendary faculty include poet and debate coach Melvin B. Tolson; James L. Farmer Sr., the first Black Texan to earn a Ph.D., a theologian and Wiley administrator; football coach Fred 'Pop' Long (35 years, three national titles); sociologists Oliver Cromwell Cox and Andrew Polk Watson; classical scholar Reuben Shannon Lovinggood; and music's Lucille Dogan Teycer.
17th president; led the 2023 return to Wiley University name and the graduate program expansion.
Oversees operations including the Heman Sweatt Scholarship program with Strada Education Foundation.
Rebuilt the marching band from zero after a 50-year absence; leads the Marching Grandioso.
Directs the A Cappella Choir — the ensemble that recorded the Birth of a Nation soundtrack and tours internationally.
Wiley is small — about 600 students, roughly 84% Black — and it feels like it: a tight campus where the choir, the debate team, and now the rebuilt marching band carry the school's public identity. Homecoming week is the biggest event of the year, and the whole school orbits the memory of 1935 — 'Go Forth Inspired' isn't a slogan so much as a charge. Roughly half of students live in college housing; the school runs a student newspaper, radio station, and television station.