Saints College

History

Saints College was founded in 1918 as the Saints Industrial and Literary School to provide academic and vocational education to Black children of Holmes County, Mississippi, in a Jim Crow public-school system that systematically denied them comparable resources. The institution was sited on the same Lexington campus where Bishop Charles Harrison Mason had convened the founding meetings of the Church of God in Christ in the years immediately following 1907 — making Lexington, in the denominational memory of COGIC, the spiritual birthplace of Black Pentecostalism in America.

Arenia Conelia Mallory arrived from Chicago in 1926 at the invitation of Bishop Mason, initially to teach music. She remained for the next fifty-one years. Under Mallory's leadership the school added grades incrementally until it offered a complete primary, secondary, and eventually junior-college program. By the mid-twentieth century, Saints was attracting students from outside Mississippi — from the migration-era Black communities of Chicago, Detroit, St. Louis, and the West Coast — on the strength of its academic reputation and its boarding facilities. The institution operated under various names as its scope expanded: Saints Industrial and Literary School in its early decades, Saints Junior College and Academy as it added post-secondary instruction, and ultimately Saints College.

Mallory herself was a national figure in Black education and women's leadership. She earned advanced degrees from Jackson State and elsewhere, served as the first woman president of COGIC's national education department, sat on multiple federal advisory bodies under the Roosevelt and subsequent administrations, and was active in the National Council of Negro Women alongside Mary McLeod Bethune. Under her tenure Saints became the rare Black Pentecostal institution to achieve national academic visibility; without her, the institution did not develop a comparable successor leadership.

Following Mallory's death in 1977, Saints continued to operate but at progressively smaller scale. The campus remained in COGIC hands throughout; the institution closed degree-granting operations in 2006, and in 2018 COGIC formally reopened the historic site for non-degree denominational use.

Notable Figures

• Bishop Charles Harrison Mason — founder of the Church of God in Christ and the figure whose ministry consecrated the Lexington campus that Saints inherited.
• Arenia Conelia Mallory — principal and president of Saints for fifty-one years; first woman president of COGIC's national education department; member of the National Council of Negro Women.
• COGIC clergy and educators — Saints functioned as a primary credentialing institution for two generations of Church of God in Christ ministers, teachers, and missionaries across the Mississippi Delta and the Great Migration cities.
• Black professionals across the Delta — for decades Saints produced the Black teachers, nurses, and skilled clerical workers whose options elsewhere in Holmes County were limited or nonexistent under segregation.

Significance

Saints College was the institutional anchor of the Church of God in Christ's educational mission and the single HBCU founded by a Black Pentecostal denomination to achieve junior-college standing. Within the HBCU universe, denominational affiliations cluster heavily around mainline Protestant bodies — Baptist, Methodist, AME, Presbyterian, Episcopal — with Pentecostal-founded institutions comparatively scarce. Saints' fifty-one-year run under Arenia Mallory's leadership was the high-water mark of Pentecostal HBCU education in the United States.

Mallory's tenure also represents one of the longest continuous executive leaderships by a Black woman of any HBCU in the twentieth century — rivaled by figures like Mary McLeod Bethune at Bethune-Cookman and Willa Beatrice Player at Bennett, but with the distinct feature of operating in the most rurally isolated and economically constrained of the Black Belt counties.

The 2018 reactivation of the campus by COGIC, while it has not restored degree-granting status, preserves the physical site of both the denomination's founding ministry and its principal historical educational institution — an unusual instance of denominational continuity surviving an HBCU's closure.