Talladega College

History

Talladega College's founding belongs to one of the most directly self-authored origin stories among American HBCUs. On November 20, 1865 - barely seven months after Appomattox - William Savery and Thomas Tarrant, two formerly enslaved men from Talladega, attended a Freedmen's Bureau convention in Mobile and committed themselves, in writing, to the proposition that education was the indispensable safeguard of newly won liberty. Savery and Tarrant returned home, raised funds among the freedpeople of Talladega, and in partnership with General Wager Swayne of the Freedmen's Bureau and the American Missionary Association acquired the property of a previously segregated white Baptist academy. The school opened in November 1867 with approximately 140 students.

The acquisition story is structurally important: the Baptist academy whose buildings Talladega occupied had been constructed in part with the labor of enslaved people, several of whom Savery and Tarrant were said to have known personally. The legal transfer of those buildings from the white slaveholding institution to a Black-led educational institution within two years of emancipation is among the most direct material reversals of the antebellum order documented in the historical record.

Talladega was chartered by the State of Alabama as a four-year college in 1869 and became the state's first liberal-arts institution open to Black students. It was sustained for most of its first century by the American Missionary Association and the United Church of Christ, and remains affiliated with the UCC today. The college has been a member institution of the United Negro College Fund since the fund's inception in 1944.

Among the institution's most celebrated holdings are the six murals known as the Hale Woodruff Amistad Murals, commissioned by the college in 1938 to commemorate the 1839 mutiny aboard the Spanish slave ship La Amistad and the subsequent Supreme Court case that freed the captives. The murals are housed in the Savery Library; an additional Amistad-themed mural is embedded in the library floor, which by tradition is never to be stepped upon.

Dr. Willie L. Todd, Jr. became Talladega's 22nd president in 2025, and was formally invested as its 22nd president in a four-day investiture ceremony culminating on February 20, 2026. His tenure opens amid acute financial pressure: in June 2025 the SACSCOC Board of Trustees placed the college on Warning for non-compliance with standards governing financial resources, and enrollment had declined to 689 students by fall 2024 after several years of contraction. The Warning sanction, which permits continued accreditation while the institution demonstrates remediation, frames the central operational challenge of the Todd administration; the college has continued to operate and enroll students under accreditation while working to satisfy the cited financial-resource standards. In August 2026 Talladega advanced that work on the enrollment side, announcing a transfer-articulation agreement with Lawson State Community College in Birmingham that creates a structured pathway for Lawson State students to complete their baccalaureate studies at Talladega. In its 2026 Best Colleges rankings U.S. News placed Talladega No. 60 among Regional Colleges (South) and No. 20 among Top Performers on Social Mobility, a recognition of the college’s access mission even amid fiscal strain.

Significance

Talladega is the oldest private HBCU in Alabama and one of the few HBCUs whose founding was initiated and led, from the outset, by formerly enslaved people themselves rather than by Northern missionary societies acting on their behalf. The Savery-Tarrant origin places Talladega in the small subset of American colleges whose founding documents - in the substantive sense - were authored by their intended students.

The Hale Woodruff Amistad Murals are among the most significant works of twentieth-century African American visual art held by an HBCU. Their 2012 conservation campaign and accompanying national tour - including stops at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History - reintroduced the murals to a broader American audience and remain a touchpoint in scholarship on Black history painting and institutional patronage.

Notable Alumni

A representative selection.

Source notes: This entry draws from the Encyclopedia of Alabama entry on Talladega College; BlackPast.org's Talladega College article; the Colored Conventions Project (Beginnings of Talladega College); and Wikipedia's article on Talladega College. The Hale Woodruff Amistad Murals discussion is corroborated by the National Museum of American History's 2012 exhibition documentation. Discrepancies noted in the corrections log.