Stillman College

History

Stillman College originated as a concept of Charles Allen Stillman, pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Tuscaloosa, who in the early 1870s petitioned the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States to establish a training school for Black ministers. The General Assembly authorized the school in 1875, and Tuscaloosa Institute held its first classes in 1876. The State of Alabama chartered the school as a legal corporation in 1895, at which point the name was changed to Stillman Institute in honor of its founder.

For its first three-quarters of a century, Stillman remained a small, denominationally focused institution. The pivotal transformation came under the administration of Samuel Burney Hay (1948-1965), who shepherded the school's expansion into a four-year senior liberal-arts college. The name was changed from Stillman Institute to Stillman College in 1948; the first baccalaureate class graduated in 1951; and the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools extended full accreditation in 1953.

Stillman occupies a particular place in the history of the modern civil rights era because of its proximity to and complicated relationship with the University of Alabama, less than two miles away. When John Rice became Dean of Students at Stillman in 1966, he and his wife Angelena moved into the college's faculty housing with their daughter Condoleezza - then twelve years old - whose subsequent academic and political trajectory was shaped, by her own account, in part by what she observed of Tuscaloosa's racial geography during her Stillman years.

Significance

Stillman is one of the small group of HBCUs whose founding mission was specifically denominational ministerial formation rather than general academic instruction, and it is the only Presbyterian-affiliated HBCU still in active operation in the southeastern United States. Its survival as a small, faith-rooted liberal-arts college through nearly 150 years of demographic, economic, and ecclesiastical shifts is itself instructive about the structural conditions that sustain - and threaten - the smaller, denominationally affiliated HBCUs.

Recent Developments

Stillman is led by Dr. Yolanda Williams Page, who became the college's eighth president in July 2023. Under her administration the college has pursued academic expansion and new institutional partnerships: Stillman launched a Bachelor of Science in Sport Management in fall 2025, and signed a memorandum of understanding with Faulkner University to broaden transfer and program pathways for students. The college retains full SACSCOC accreditation and enrolled roughly 771 students in fall 2026, with the administration aiming to surpass 800 by the start of the October B-term. Stillman is scheduled to welcome its first cohort of M.B.A. students in January 2027. In 2026 Stillman marked its sesquicentennial, 150 years since the 1876 opening of its predecessor institution, Tuscaloosa Institute, anchoring the anniversary year in its fall convocation.

Notable Alumni

A representative selection.

Source notes: This entry draws from the Encyclopedia of Alabama entry on Stillman College; Stillman College's own historical materials; and Wikipedia's article on Stillman College. The Condoleezza Rice biographical detail is corroborated by her own published memoir, Extraordinary, Ordinary People (2010). Discrepancies noted in the corrections log.