Daniel Payne College

History

Daniel Payne College was founded in Selma, Alabama, in 1889 by leading members of the African Methodist Episcopal Church's Alabama conferences. It was established under the name Payne Institute to provide secondary and post-secondary instruction for Black students, with particular emphasis on ministerial formation for AME congregations across the South. Its namesake, Bishop Daniel A. Payne (1811–1893), was a transformational figure in Black American higher education: the sixth bishop of the AME Church, the principal architect of the denomination's commitment to an educated clergy, and the first African American to serve as president of a U.S. college (Wilberforce, 1863).

The institution's original campus was located at 1525 Franklin Street, with Bishop Gaines Hall as the primary academic building and Coppin Hall as the principal dormitory. The college remained on that footprint through 1922, when it relocated to a new site in the Woodlawn section of Birmingham. The move reflected the AME Church's strategic shift toward Alabama's industrial center, where the Black population was growing rapidly and where the church's congregations were concentrated. For the next half-century, the Woodlawn campus served as the institutional anchor.

Across its years of operation the college went through several name and curriculum revisions, including periods designated as Payne University and Greater Payne University. The instructional emphasis remained ministerial and teacher-preparatory, with a liberal arts core. Faculty were drawn substantially from the AME's national clerical network, and graduates moved into pulpits and into segregated Black school systems across Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and the broader Deep South.

The 1974 forced relocation marked the beginning of the end. Birmingham's airport expansion and interstate construction took the Woodlawn campus and a substantial portion of the surrounding Black neighborhood under eminent domain. The college rebuilt at a different site, but the rebuild absorbed capital that had no replacement source. A 1977 tornado then damaged the new facilities. Enrollment, which had not recovered from the dislocation, continued to decline. The college declared bankruptcy and ceased operations in 1979.

Notable Alumni

Daniel Payne alumni were concentrated in AME ministry, Black public education, and civil rights work across the Deep South. A representative selection of leadership figures appears below; the college has not been the subject of a comprehensive published alumni accounting.

Significance

Daniel Payne College's history is significant on three counts. First, as a founding-era AME institution, it sits in direct lineage with Bishop Payne's denominational commitment to clergy education — the same lineage that produced Wilberforce, Allen, Morris Brown, Edward Waters, and Paul Quinn. Second, as a Black institution in Birmingham, it operated through the entire arc of the city's civil-rights era, from Klan-violence years into the 1963 demonstrations and beyond. Third, and most pointedly for HBCU policy literature, it is the textbook case of an HBCU killed by urban renewal: the airport-and-interstate displacement of its Woodlawn campus in 1974 destroyed institutional continuity that financial measures alone might have sustained.

The Daniel Payne Legacy Village Foundation's effort to redevelop the former campus site for community use is a partial reclamation of that displacement. The Birmingham street renaming — Sayreton Road to Daniel Payne Drive — preserves the institutional memory at the urban scale. Neither restores the college itself, but both register that the closure was not an internal failure alone.

That redevelopment work continues under the Foundation, the charitable arm of the AME Church's 9th Episcopal District. Its Daniel Payne Community Plaza already houses the Legacy Prep charter school (opened 2019), GED and computer-literacy classes, a youth basketball program, and a community food pantry. In April 2025 the Foundation launched Daniel's Meal Subscription Service, a weekly meal program for low- and moderate-income families in Birmingham's District 9, funded by a $255,000 grant from the City of Birmingham and running on a twelve-month cycle — the clearest sign yet that the former Daniel Payne campus footprint has found a sustained second life as a community-service hub rather than a redevelopment still in search of a plan.