Texas College

History

Texas College was chartered on January 9, 1894, by a group of ministers of the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church on roughly twenty-five acres of land near Tyler in East Texas. The CME Church, organized in 1870 as a separate denomination by Black members of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, was unusual among Reconstruction-era Black religious bodies in being formally constituted with the consent and material support of its white parent denomination. The educational institutions the CME established - Texas College, Lane College, Paine College, and Miles College - inherited a particular institutional culture from that denominational lineage: ecumenical theological training tied to broader liberal-arts instruction.

From 1909 to 1912, the institution operated briefly under the name Phillips University in recognition of CME Bishop Henry Phillips. Opposition from alumni and the broader CME constituency restored the original name in 1912. The college was accredited as a two-year institution by the Southern Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools in 1924, and authorized to award baccalaureate degrees in 1932.

Texas College has been a member institution of the United Negro College Fund since the fund's establishment by Frederick D. Patterson, Mary McLeod Bethune, and twenty-five other HBCU presidents in 1944. As one of the original UNCF members, the college has been part of the unbroken philanthropic infrastructure that has sustained private Black higher education for more than eighty years.

The college today offers Associate of Arts, Bachelor of Arts, and Bachelor of Science degrees across a range of disciplines, with academic concentrations in business administration, religion, education, and the natural sciences. It celebrated its 130th anniversary in 2024.

The college marked two milestones in 2026. In June 2026 SACSCOC reaffirmed Texas College’s accreditation, the culmination of a multi-year self-study completed under Dr. Dwight J. Fennell, a Texas College alumnus who had led the institution since 2007. Fennell concluded his presidency at the end of June 2026, and Dr. SherRhonda Gibbs, announced in April 2026 as the college’s 24th president, took office on July 1, 2026 — the first woman to serve as president in the college’s history.

Significance

Texas College is one of only four institutions founded by the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church and one of two CME-founded HBCUs still operating under their original names (along with Lane College in Jackson, Tennessee). The CME's status as the first major Black religious body organized with the formal consent of its parent denomination - rather than through schism, as with the AME or AME Zion churches - makes the institutional culture of its colleges historiographically distinctive.

As a founding UNCF member, Texas College is also a charter participant in what remains the single most consequential philanthropic intervention in the history of American Black higher education. The college's continued operation - through more than a century of demographic, economic, and ecclesiastical pressures - is itself an instance of the structural argument the UNCF was created to make: that small, denominationally affiliated HBCUs are infrastructure worth defending.

Notable Alumni

A representative selection. Verified biographical entries for Texas College alumni are comparatively underdocumented in publicly accessible sources; this section will be expanded as additional verification work is completed.

Source notes: This entry draws from the Texas College Quick Facts page; BlackPast.org's Texas College article; the Texas Historical Commission's African American Travel Guide; Wikipedia's article on Texas College; and the UNCF founding documentation. The 1909-1912 Phillips University renaming is corroborated in the Handbook of Texas Online. Discrepancies noted in the corrections log.