Roger Williams University

History

Roger Williams University traces its origins to 1864, when Daniel W. Phillips, a white Baptist minister sent south by the American Baptist Home Mission Society, began holding elementary classes in his Nashville home for African American Baptist preachers seeking the literacy and theological training they had been categorically denied under slavery. Nashville at the time was under Union military occupation, and the city had become a hub for missionary education of the formerly enslaved. In 1866 the school was formally incorporated as the Nashville Normal and Theological Institute under the auspices of the ABHMS.

The institution awarded its first bachelor's degree in the early 1870s and, in 1874-75, purchased the Robert Gordon farm on Hillsboro Road, where it built a permanent campus. In 1883 the school was renamed Roger Williams University after the seventeenth-century Rhode Island Baptist founder who had championed religious liberty and equitable treatment of Native peoples. By 1886 the curriculum had expanded to include a master's degree program; the university trained generations of Black Baptist clergy, teachers, and the small but consequential professional class then emerging in the upper South.

On the night of January 23, 1905, a fire of undetermined origin destroyed the main administration building. In May 1905 a second fire destroyed the remaining principal building. Contemporary accounts and later scholarship have treated the fires as suspicious; no perpetrators were ever identified, but the pattern of destruction and the broader context of post-Reconstruction violence against Black institutions in Nashville pointed strongly toward arson. The ABHMS suspended operations and transferred the surviving student body to Atlanta Baptist College, which would later become Morehouse College.

In 1908 the university reopened on a smaller campus on Whites Creek Pike, but the loss of the original physical plant, the disruption of its donor base, and the broader contraction of Baptist mission funding in the early twentieth century left the institution permanently undercapitalized. By the late 1920s the financial position had become untenable. On December 29, 1929, after sixty-five years of operation, Roger Williams University merged with Howe Institute in Memphis, a Baptist institution that itself reorganized in subsequent decades into the present-day LeMoyne-Owen College.

Notable Alumni

• Buck Colbert Franklin — Attorney who represented survivors of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre and led legal efforts to rebuild Greenwood, the prosperous Black district known as Black Wall Street. His contemporaneous documentary record of the massacre was rediscovered in 2015.
• Sutton E. Griggs — Baptist minister and author of Imperium in Imperio (1899), a foundational early Black political novel.
• J. C. Napier — Nashville attorney, civic leader, and Register of the U.S. Treasury under President Taft.

Significance

Roger Williams University's significance rests on three pillars. First, it was one of the principal seminary-to-university institutions of the post-Civil War Black Baptist tradition, training the clergy and lay leadership of a denomination that would become and remain the largest organized expression of Black Christianity in the United States. The institution's curriculum, faculty, and alumni network were instrumental in the consolidation of the National Baptist Convention in the late nineteenth century.

Second, the destruction of the Hillsboro Road campus by twin fires in 1905, and the institutional fragility that followed, exemplifies a pattern that recurs across the early history of HBCU closures: institutions that survived emancipation and Reconstruction did not always survive the violence and economic strangulation of the Jim Crow period. The fires, whether or not formally proven to be arson, functioned as such; the institution never recovered, and the broader Black Nashville educational infrastructure was permanently weakened.

Third, through its most distinguished alumnus, Buck Colbert Franklin, the university produced one of the indispensable figures in the legal history of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. Franklin's representation of Greenwood survivors and his contemporaneous documentary record of the massacre constitute a primary historical source that exists in significant part because Roger Williams University trained him as a lawyer. Roger Williams may be closed, but the chain of consequence from its classroom to Greenwood is one of the cleanest examples of HBCU legacy in American legal history.