Arkansas Baptist College

Arkansas Baptist College
Little Rock, Arkansas — Founded 1884

History

Arkansas Baptist College was founded in 1884 by the Colored Baptists of Arkansas, who convened in Little Rock to establish an institution for the higher education of Black Arkansans at a time when no such opportunity otherwise existed in the state. It was chartered under Arkansas law as a private institution, operating under the governance of Black Baptist conventions and sustained primarily by the economic sacrifices of Black church communities across the state. The college operated through economic depression, two world wars, and the full length of the Jim Crow era without losing its accreditation or its independence.

The institution’s location in Little Rock gives it a particular historical resonance. In September 1957, Governor Orval Faubus ordered the Arkansas National Guard to surround Little Rock Central High School and prevent the enrollment of nine Black students selected by the NAACP to test the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling. For three weeks, the Little Rock Nine were turned away by armed soldiers under state orders. President Dwight D. Eisenhower ultimately federalized the National Guard and deployed the 101st Airborne Division to enforce the federal court’s desegregation order — the first time since Reconstruction that the federal government had deployed military force to protect the civil rights of Black Americans.

Arkansas Baptist College existed throughout this crisis and the decades of racial violence and legal suppression that preceded it, serving as one of the few institutional spaces in the state where Black intellectual life could be sustained and Black professionals could be trained.

In recent years the college has confronted acute financial and governance pressures characteristic of small private HBCUs. Fall 2024 enrollment fell to roughly 326 students, and in early 2025 the college reported difficulty meeting payroll over consecutive months, the elimination of staff positions, and the closure of its long-running childcare center. The leadership instability deepened when Dr. Leslie Rodriguez-McClellon, who had become president in November 2024, was asked by the board and the college’s crisis management team to resign in April 2025; George Herts served as interim president, and in October 2025 William L. “Bill” Walker Jr. — a former Arkansas state legislator and chairman of the college’s board of trustees — assumed the presidency. Walker’s tenure proved short: on August 24, 2026, the board of trustees, chaired by Roland Gosey, voted to terminate him following a period of administrative leave and internal review, without publicly stating a cause. The board again named George Herts — a longtime administrator who had previously served as interim president and as vice president of academic and student affairs — as acting president, effective immediately. Herts inherits an institution still working through self-imposed financial exigency and preparing for a show-cause process with the Higher Learning Commission, a consequential test for a college that had only regained full accreditation in 2022 after a period of probation.

Despite these pressures, Arkansas Baptist College continues to emphasize STEM education, business, and community health programs aimed at persistent disparities in Central Arkansas, and remains one of the few institutional spaces in the state with a 140-year record of sustaining Black higher education.

Little Rock and the Crisis of 1957

The Little Rock Crisis of 1957 was not a spontaneous confrontation. It was a planned test of federal authority, organized by the NAACP with the deliberate selection of nine students who were academically qualified and temperamentally prepared for the extraordinary ordeal they would face. The Arkansas National Guard surrounded Central High School for weeks. Mobs gathered outside. Soldiers with fixed bayonets eventually escorted Black teenagers through crowds screaming racial epithets — a scene broadcast on national television that changed American opinion about the South and about the costs of enforcing the Constitution. Arkansas Baptist College — five years older than Central High itself — had been providing Black Arkansans with higher education since before any of those students were born.

Notable Alumni

Alumni records are being verified. This section will be updated as entries are confirmed against institutional sources.

Source notes: Arkansas Baptist College institutional charter and archives; Grif Stockley, Daisy Bates: Civil Rights Crusader from Arkansas (2005); Elizabeth Jacoway and C. Fred Williams, eds., Understanding the Little Rock Crisis (1999); Karen Anderson, Little Rock: Race and Resistance at Central High School (2010).