Paul Quinn College: Oldest Black College West of the Mississippi

On a forty-four-acre campus in south Dallas, Paul Quinn College carries a history that stretches back to the spring of eighteen seventy-two, when a handful of African Methodist Episcopal preachers gathered in Austin with a singular purpose: to educate the children of formerly enslaved people. The school they founded, first called the Connectional School for the Education of Negro Youth, moved to Waco in eighteen seventy-seven, received its state charter in eighteen eighty-one, and took the name of William Paul Quinn, the fourth bishop of the AME Church. It is, by that count, the oldest historically Black college west of the Mississippi River.

For over a century the college anchored itself to that tradition, training students in theology, the trades, and the liberal arts. Then came the nineteen nineties, the move to Dallas, and a slow fiscal unraveling that nearly closed the doors for good. By two thousand seven enrollment had collapsed to fewer than two hundred students and accreditation was in danger of being revoked.

The reversal that followed is now taught in business schools. When Michael Sorrell became president that year, he inherited an institution on the edge. His first move was to eliminate the football program. In two thousand ten, he turned the old practice field into something entirely different: the We Over Me Farm, an organic urban farm that has grown more than thirty thousand pounds of produce since its founding, supplying dining halls and local restaurants, and addressing food-desert conditions in one of Dallas's most underserved ZIP codes.

Sorrell also remade Paul Quinn as the nation's first urban work college, pairing every student with paid employment through a work-learning program for all four years of their degree. More than eighty percent of graduates leave with jobs already secured. Enrollment has rebounded, accreditation was restored, and the college landed on national lists of most innovative institutions in American higher education.

From a one-room church school teaching freedmen carpentry in eighteen seventy-two to a food-producing, work-integrated college in twenty-first-century Dallas, Paul Quinn has rewritten itself without erasing where it came from.