New Orleans, Louisiana · Founded 1925 · Gold Rush (men) / Gold Nuggets (women)
“The only Black Catholic university in America — and for thirty-plus years the nation's #1 sender of Black students to medical school.”
A 1940 16mm educational film about Xavier — extraordinary archival footage of the Black Catholic university in the Jim Crow era, preserved by A/V Geeks.
Louisiana Public Broadcasting profile from the heart of the Norman Francis era — the school as Louisiana saw it in the mid-1980s.
The university's own storytelling series on its history and traditions — the official 'this is who we are' film.
The Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament's film of the October 1, 2000 canonization — the day Xavier became the first Catholic university founded by a saint.
6abc Philadelphia documentary on the founder — the Philadelphia heiress who spent her fortune on Black and Native American education.
Congressman and second-generation alumnus Troy Carter addresses the class of 2023 — the Xavier-to-Capitol-Hill pipeline on stage.
STEM NOLA founder Dr. Calvin Mackie's 2026 commencement keynote — a Black STEM leader charging the next class of Xavier pre-meds and scientists.
Full 2026 commencement for the pharmacy and graduate programs — the PharmD pipeline that has produced nearly a quarter of America's Black pharmacists.
The 2026 undergraduate commencement — hundreds of future doctors, dentists, and pharmacists walking in one morning.
The XULA Concert Choir performing 'Make Them Hear You' — the choral tradition that goes back to the 1941 Carmen performance at the motherhouse.
The Gospel Choir in performance — the sound that closes homecoming and anchors campus worship.
The Gospel Choir leading 'Total Praise' at a finals-week prayer service — faith and student life fused, the Xavier way.
18th U.S. Surgeon General (Obama administration); Xavier pre-med graduate who founded a rural Alabama clinic for the uninsured and moonlighted in ERs for a decade to fund it.
Class of 1969; 23rd U.S. Secretary of Labor (1997–2001) — the first Black American to hold the office — and youngest-ever director of the Labor Department's Women's Bureau under Carter.
Class of 1952; Xavier's president for 47 years (1968–2015), the longest-serving university president in U.S. history; Presidential Medal of Freedom, 2006.
First Black mayor of New Orleans; first Black graduate of LSU Law and first African American elected to the Louisiana legislature since Reconstruction.
Retired four-star U.S. Air Force general — only the third African American to reach the rank — and former head of the Space and Defense Systems Command; attended Xavier in the 1950s.
62nd mayor of New Orleans (2018–2026); the first woman — and first Black woman — elected to the office.
Class of 1986; Democratic congressman for Louisiana's 2nd district since 2021; a second-generation Xavier graduate who spoke at the 2023 commencement.
Federal judge on the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana.
NASA computer scientist, mathematician, and rocket engineer — a pioneer whose work underpinned early NASA spaceflight computing.
Nationally known civil rights attorney.
Immunologist and researcher.
Sculptor.
Katharine Drexel was born in 1858 into one of the wealthiest banking families in America, and she walked away from that fortune to found the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament in 1891, dedicating her life to schooling Black and Native American children the country had abandoned. She spent her inheritance building more than 60 schools and missions across the South and West. On October 1, 2000 — 45 years after her death — Pope John Paul II canonized her, making her the fifth American saint and only the second born in the United States. Xavier exists because of that one woman's money and stubbornness.
At the request of Archbishop James H. Blenk and local Black Catholics, Mother Katharine opened high school classes for Black youth in 1915 in the buildings of the old Southern University, a state school that had moved elsewhere. The school was given special permission by Church officials to operate co-educationally — unusual for a Catholic school then — and it opened its doors to students of every faith, not just Catholics. It was a direct answer to the fact that Black students were denied admission to every existing local, state, and Catholic college. From the start, 69.9 percent of its students would be African American and only about a quarter Catholic.
Two years after the high school opened, Xavier added a teacher-training department — one of the very few professional paths open to Black Americans at the time. A year later, in 1918, the school began awarding two-year post-secondary degrees in commercial, music, and industrial studies. Even as a high school with a normal department, Xavier was already functioning as a college for people the colleges wouldn't take. That pipeline — Black students, professional credentials, service back to the community — became the school's permanent shape.
In 1925 the normal department expanded into a Teacher's College, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences opened, and a pre-medical course was added — Xavier University of Louisiana was real. It was established as the first co-educational Catholic college in the country. The first president was the Rev. Edward J. Brunner, S.S.J., a Josephite who served in a consultative capacity while Mother Agatha Ryan, a Sister of the Blessed Sacrament, followed him in leadership. The first degrees were awarded in 1928, and the first graduating class — five students, photographed with Brunner and future Josephite superior general Fr. Edward Casserly — walked in 1929.
Xavier opened its College of Pharmacy in 1927, and it would become one of the most consequential pharmacy programs in American history — since then, nearly one in four Black pharmacists practicing in the United States has been a Xavier graduate. The school's own archives credit Mother Katharine's sister Louise Drexel Morrell with funding an annex, and note that Drexel and local Black leaders founded a historical association to buy rare books and manuscripts on Black history for the university library. Pharmacy gave Xavier a second identity alongside pre-med: the place that trained the Black health workforce. Today it remains one of only two pharmacy schools in Louisiana.
Deciding the university needed its own identity and room to grow, Drexel bought a tract of undeveloped land at Palmetto and Pine Streets in 1929. Xavier Stadium was dedicated on September 28, 1930, and the first game — Xavier vs. Wiley University — was played October 4, 1930. Construction began in 1931 on the U-shaped Gothic Administration Building in Indiana limestone, dedicated October 12, 1932 and opened in fall 1933; it is now a New Orleans city landmark. The campus has since expanded to three times that original footprint.
Mother Agatha Ryan, S.B.S., a Philadelphia native educated at Catholic University and Villanova, led Xavier from 1931 to 1955 — and she arrived with a record: as the order's Directress of Schools she had established 48 elementary schools and 14 high schools. Under her leadership Xavier developed the College of Arts & Sciences, the College of Pharmacy, and the graduate school. She had also been a pioneer in teaching Native Americans before coming to New Orleans. The 1937 library (now the music department building) and the 1937 gymnasium called 'The Barn' both date to her era.
In 1941 Drexel and the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament celebrated their golden jubilee — 50 years of service — and students from the schools she founded traveled to the motherhouse in Bensalem, Pennsylvania, for a program celebrating their cultures. Xavier's music department performed a scene from the opera Carmen, a small detail that says a lot: this was a Black Catholic school in the Jim Crow South staging French opera for the order's jubilee. The music program was already a point of pride. Six years earlier, in 1935, Drexel had suffered a series of heart attacks and retired permanently to the motherhouse.
Katharine Drexel died in 1955, forty-five years before her canonization, having spent her last two decades in quiet retirement while her schools ran on. That same year Sister M. Josephina Kenney, S.B.S., became president (1955–1965); she had taught education at Xavier since 1949 and served as Supervisor of Elementary Schools for the Archdiocese of New Orleans. She was followed by Sister M. Maris Stella Ross, S.B.S. (1965–1968), the last of the religious to lead Xavier in a formal capacity. The sister-presidents kept the school growing through the civil rights era, but the order was already planning to hand the reins to lay leadership.
On April 4, 1968 — the day Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis — the Sisters appointed Norman C. Francis as president, the first lay, first male, and first African American head of the university. Francis was 37, a 1952 Xavier alumnus who had started as Dean of Men in 1957 and risen to executive vice president; he had already turned the sisters down twice because he wanted to be a big-time lawyer. Two years earlier the Sisters had created a separate Louisiana corporation board with four lay members, the first step toward independence. Francis would hold the presidency for 47 years — the longest tenure of any sitting U.S. university president — and the school would become virtually synonymous with him.
In 1970 the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament formally transferred governance of the university to an independent, biracial Board of Trustees on which the Sisters kept representation — the school was now lay-governed but still Catholic to the bone. That same year the new College of Pharmacy building was dedicated on April 5 (groundbreaking had been in 1968). The transfer settled the question the 1966 board had raised: Xavier would be run by the community it served. The Sisters maintain a vital presence on campus to this day, staffing roles and providing financial assistance.
Pope John Paul II visited Xavier's campus in 1987 — a staggering honor for a small Black Catholic school in New Orleans, and a sign of how seriously the Vatican took Drexel's work. The spot where he spoke is marked to this day: the St. Katharine Drexel Chapel, built in 2012, was deliberately aligned with the location of his 1987 address. The visit came as the Church moved Drexel toward sainthood — she was canonized on October 1, 2000. Few American universities of any kind have hosted a sitting pope.
By 1993 Xavier had become the nation's #1 placer of African American students into medical schools — a ranking it has held every year since, for more than three decades. The U.S. Department of Education also ranks Xavier first nationally in Black undergraduates earning degrees in biology and the life sciences, chemistry, physics, and pharmacy. The medical and dental school acceptance rate runs around 70 percent, nearly twice the national average, and 93 percent of those who enter finish their degrees. The National Science Foundation named Xavier one of six Model Institutions for Excellence in science, engineering, and mathematics. This is the centerpiece of the school's identity: Xavier doesn't just educate Black students, it makes Black doctors.
On October 1, 2000, Pope John Paul II canonized Katharine Drexel, and Xavier became the first Catholic university in history founded by a saint. The school's own catalog puts the distinction plainly: of 101 historically Black colleges and 221 Catholic colleges in America, only one is both — and it was built by a woman the Church now calls Saint. The canonization crowned a century of work that began with a high school in borrowed buildings. Every October, the campus still celebrates her feast day as its own.
Hurricane Katrina put much of Xavier's campus underwater in August 2005, and students scattered to colleges across the country for the fall semester with a plan to be back on Drexel Drive by spring. The Blessed Sacrament sisters cooked for students sheltering in the dorms before the evacuation. Less than five months later, in January 2006, classes resumed on the shipwrecked campus — one of the fastest university recoveries in the storm's aftermath. Governor Kathleen Blanco then appointed Francis to chair the Louisiana Recovery Authority, the body that decided how to dole out more than $10 billion in federal recovery money to parishes devastated by Katrina and Rita. The rebuild ultimately cost about $130 million and left the campus better than the storm found it.
In December 2006 President George W. Bush presented Norman Francis with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, for a lifetime spent building an institution that lifted Black families into the professions. Francis had already advised eight presidential administrations on education and civil rights, chaired the boards of the Educational Testing Service, the College Board, the Carnegie Foundation, and the UNCF, and served on the National Commission on Excellence in Education that produced the landmark 1983 report A Nation at Risk. In 2009 he was named one of 'America's Best Leaders' by U.S. News and Harvard's Center for Public Leadership. He collected 40 honorary degrees along the way.
The post-Katrina building boom crested in 2012 with two landmarks: the St. Katharine Drexel Chapel, the first free-standing place of worship in the university's history — an octagonal Pelli Clarke design with a faceted copper dome and a carillon, set at the campus center — and the 93,500-square-foot Convocation Center, a 4,800-seat arena that replaced the storm-destroyed Barn as home court for basketball and volleyball. The $29 million Qatar Pharmacy Pavilion, funded largely by a $17.5 million Katrina-relief grant from the government of Qatar, had opened in 2010. Together with $130 million in renovations, the new buildings erased the storm's traces. The campus is nicknamed 'Emerald City' for the green roofs on its buildings.
On June 30, 2015, Norman Francis retired after 47 years — the longest-serving university president in the United States, a man who had more than doubled enrollment, built nearly every building on campus, and turned a small Catholic college into the country's Black pre-med capital. On July 1, Dr. C. Reynold Verret took office as the sixth president, chosen by the board from more than 300 candidates — the first time the trustees had ever selected a president. Verret, who arrived in America as a Haitian refugee in 1963, holds a Columbia bachelor's and an MIT PhD in biochemistry, and he is also a trained saxophonist who talks about Xavier the way a musician talks about an ensemble. Francis was named President Emeritus; he died in February 2026 at 94.
With no football team, Xavier had gone nearly a century without a marching band — then in 2019 the athletics department hired Darren Rodgers, a New Orleans native and Talladega/Southern bandsman who runs the Roots of Music youth program, to build a pep band from scratch. It started as a small band club and was christened the Golden Sound Marching Band in January 2023, when Athletics and the Music Division formally partnered to grow it into an HBCU-style powerhouse. The 65-member band now offers partial scholarships, performs at home games, marches New Orleans Mardi Gras parades, and represented the school at Essence Fest 2024. Rodgers was later named a quarterfinalist for the GRAMMY Music Educator Award. The older music traditions — Concert Choir, Gospel Choir, Symphonic Band, and an Opera Workshop — go back generations.
After four decades in the Gulf Coast Athletic Conference (1981–2021), Xavier moved its 12 varsity programs into the Red River Athletic Conference for the 2021–22 academic year, competing as an NAIA school. The Gold Rush (men) and Gold Nuggets (women) field baseball, basketball, cross country, tennis, track & field, softball, volleyball, and coed competitive cheer from the Convocation Center and the XULA Tennis Center. Football has been gone since the late 1950s — cost and shrinking enrollment killed it — so basketball is the marquee sport, and the Crosstown Classic against Dillard is the rivalry game. In 2026 the school announced a move to the NAIA's Southern States Athletic Conference, effective July 1, 2026.
In April 2024 Xavier and Ochsner Health — Louisiana's largest nonprofit health system, a partner since the 1980s — announced the Xavier Ochsner College of Medicine, to be housed in Benson Tower in downtown New Orleans' BioDistrict. It will be the first medical school in the Gulf South operated by an HBCU, joining Howard, Meharry, Morehouse, and Charles Drew as only the fifth historically Black medical school in America. Bloomberg Philanthropies put $5 million in seed funding behind it in August 2024 as part of its Greenwood Initiative. Recruitment of the first class is set for 2027, with Dr. Leonardo Seoane named founding dean. The same summer, the Golden Sound Marching Band and the Xavier Choir performed at the 30th Essence Festival as the school's ambassadors.
On January 17, 2025, several hundred people packed the campus to kick off Xavier's centennial year as a university — 100 years since the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences made it real. The school launched a $500 million Centennial Campaign for scholarships, infrastructure, and student well-being, with $125 million already raised at kickoff. Congressman Troy Carter, class of 1986 and a second-generation Xavier graduate, spoke alongside Miss Xavier Youma Diabira. The centennial homecoming in November closed with a Gospel Concert Extravaganza headlined by Yolanda Adams in the Convocation Center, uniting alumni and student Gospel Choir members across generations. A century in, the mission hasn't moved: find the talent, shape it, send it out to heal.
New Orleans' Black-college derby: Xavier's Gold Rush and Gold Nuggets versus Dillard's Bleu Devils, played as a basketball doubleheader at the Convocation Center. The two schools are the city's HBCU pillars — one Catholic, one United Methodist/United Church of Christ — and the Classic packs the building every year. It is the game circled on both campuses' calendars, part neighborhood bragging rights and part recruiting showcase.
A legacy rivalry from four decades together in the Gulf Coast Athletic Conference (1981–2021) — two small, academically elite HBCUs whose basketball meetings, like the 2021 GCAC matchup, carried conference-tournament weight. The conference move to the RRAC in 2021 cooled the annual series, but older alumni still talk about the GCAC wars.
🥁 Golden Sound Marching Band · since 2019
Xavier went nearly a century without a marching band — football died in the late 1950s — until the athletics department founded a small pep band club in 2019. In January 2023 Athletics and the Music Division formally christened it the Golden Sound Marching Band with a mission to rival HBCU bands, growing it to 65 members with partial band scholarships. It plays home games, marches Mardi Gras parades, and served as an Olay brand ambassador at Essence Fest 2024. The deeper music tradition lives in the Concert Choir, Gospel Choir, Symphonic Band, and the Opera Workshop led by Dr. Sakinah Davis.
New Orleans native; Talladega College graduate (Marching Tornado Band, euphonium section leader) and former Southern University 'Human Jukebox' bandsman; director of bands at the Roots of Music youth nonprofit. Hired to build the pep band from zero; named a quarterfinalist for the GRAMMY Music Educator Award.
Xavier runs eight of the Divine Nine under its NPHC chapter — Iota Phi Theta is the one absence — on the only Catholic HBCU campus in the country. What distinguishes Xavier's Greek culture is how tightly the school governs it: the XULA NPHC constitution ties chapter active status to a 2.8 GPA floor with bi-weekly professor progress reports, $25 fines for committee non-participation, and suspension for chapters that fall short — among the strictest Greek governance in Black college life. Probates and homecoming yard shows are the public face of the chapters. A professional-fraternity layer reflects the pharmacy powerhouse: Kappa Psi's Delta Eta chapter chartered at Xavier in March 1972 alongside the College of Pharmacy.
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Land purchased June 1929; dedicated September 28, 1930, with the first game — Xavier vs. Wiley University — on October 4, 1930. It gave the young university a real home field in the era when it still fielded football, baseball, and track teams.
Construction began in 1931 on the U-shaped Gothic building in Indiana limestone, dedicated October 12, 1932 and opened in fall 1933. Built with Drexel's money on the land she bought in 1929, it remains the campus focal point and a New Orleans city landmark — the building Dr. Francis pointed to as the one he 'reported to' for 40 years.
The old library (dedicated October 12, 1937, now the Music Department building) and the gymnasium nicknamed 'The Barn' (dedicated November 2, 1937) both date to the Ryan presidency. The Barn served as the basketball home for 75 years until Katrina heavily damaged it.
The science complex that anchored Xavier's rise as a STEM and pre-med powerhouse, built during the Francis era's great expansion. A major addition followed in 1998, and the complex still houses the biology, chemistry, and physics departments that feed the medical-school pipeline.
A remodeled Library and Resource Center plus an addition to the College of Pharmacy, part of the 1990s building wave (with the 1990 purchase of the Xavier South office building and the 1994 Peter Claver women's dormitory) that kept pace with enrollment nearly doubling since 1986.
The upperclassmen coed residence opened in 1998 alongside the science complex addition, giving juniors and seniors a dedicated residential community. Its green roof is one of the reasons students call the campus 'Emerald City.'
The new University Center (2003) became the student-life hub, and St. Martin de Porres residence hall (2003) added upperclassmen housing. Both were part of the pre-Katrina expansion that the 2005 storm would then test.
A $29 million, five-story, 55,000-square-foot home for the College of Pharmacy, funded largely by a $17.5 million Katrina-relief grant from the government of Qatar. It keeps Xavier — one of only two pharmacy schools in Louisiana and a top-three national producer of Black PharmD graduates — at the forefront of pharmacy education.
The 93,500-square-foot, 4,800-seat arena on the West Campus replaced the Katrina-destroyed Barn as home court for basketball and volleyball and as the venue for commencements and concerts. It cost $25 million — $18 million from the federal HBCU loan program and $7 million from FEMA — and both the center and its annex earned LEED Silver certification.
The first free-standing place of worship in the university's history, designed by Pelli Clarke & Partners: an octagonal chapel with limestone walls, a faceted copper dome, a 15-foot cross, and a meditation chapel with a carillon of bells. It sits at the campus center, deliberately aligned with the spot where Pope John Paul II spoke during his 1987 visit — the spiritual heart of the only Black Catholic university in America.
A $4.7 million FEMA-funded rehabilitation of St. Joseph's Hall, a women's dormitory for 40 years that Katrina mauled, into a three-story academic support building with centers for math, writing, reading, and counseling. It absorbed the student services from the hurricane-destroyed student center.
Opened in 2015 as the athletics program's modern training home, rounding out the West Campus build-out alongside the Convocation Center and supporting 12 varsity programs.
Xavier's faculty is small and credentialed — about 221 full-time educators with a 14-to-1 student-faculty ratio, and over 50 endowed chairs and professorships supporting research and teaching. The staff culture is famously familial: generations of New Orleanians have worked the switchboards, dorms, and labs, and the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament still staff campus roles.
Sixth president (2015–present); Haitian-born biochemist (Columbia, MIT PhD); chosen from 300+ candidates.
Chief academic officer of the university.
Chairs the independent lay/religious board that has governed Xavier since the Sisters transferred control in 1970.
Leads the 12-sport NAIA program (Gold Rush/Gold Nuggets) through its 2026 move to the Southern States Athletic Conference.
Built the band from a 2019 pep-band club into a 65-member marching band; GRAMMY Music Educator Award quarterfinalist.
Leads the Opera Workshop and its Musical Revue showcases in the Blanche M. Francis Musical Building Recital Hall.
Named to lead the new medical school in Benson Tower, with first-class recruitment set for 2027.
Xavier feels like a small, serious, deeply Catholic family dropped into the middle of New Orleans — about 3,200 students on an enclosed, quiet campus of yellow brick and limestone nicknamed 'Emerald City' for its green roofs. The pre-med grind is the dominant culture: biology is the biggest major by far (800+ students), and the library hums with students chasing that 70 percent medical-school acceptance rate. But the Catholic identity is just as real — Mass, prayer services, and the chapel anchor the week, and the student body runs a radio station, YouTube channel, and podcast. The 1925 Society, an alumni group founded in 2014, raises scholarship money and keeps graduates tethered. Off campus, students live in the most culturally rich college city in America: Mardi Gras, second lines, and the Bayou Classic are part of the four-year experience.