Roger Williams University

Founded in 1866 as the Nashville Normal and Theological Institute, Roger Williams University trained African American teachers, preachers, and missionaries and also maintained primary and secondary divisions. The school conferred its first bachelor degree in the mid-1870s and relocated to a new campus largely purchased by American Baptist Home Mission Society after a local white Baptist minister led the $30,000 fundraising effort. The new location was purchased in 1874 on Hillsboro Road in West Nashville. It was literally across the street from another new school, Vanderbilt University, established a year earlier. Incorporated as Roger Williams University in 1883, the school awarded its first master’s degree in 1886. The university operated without interruption from 1883 through 1905 and averaged approximately 100 students during these years, with 60 percent male and 40 percent female.

Roger Williams was pivotal in the debate over the uplift of the Black community during the Jim Crow Era. John Hope, an African American professor at the school and later president of Morehouse and Atlanta Universities, took an aggressive tone as he addressed the Negro Debate Society of Nashville in a rebuttal of Booker T. Washington’s model of self-improvement and industrial education: “If we are not striving for equality, in heaven’s name for what are we living?”

In 1911, the campus was sold to Peabody College, passing the valuable property from the hands of a Black teachers’ college to that of a white teachers’ college after a series of fires. Though there remains a great deal of suspicion that the fires were intentionally set, no official cause was ever determined. Like a phoenix, Roger Williams University rose from the ashes, albeit on a different campus. The school moved to North Nashville in 1908.

Prior to 1912, Roger Williams University and Fisk University had produced the largest number of African American teachers in Nashville, and many of their graduates served as primary and secondary teachers throughout the South. The need for African American teachers was immense, with over 40 percent of the Black population unable to read or write through the 1860s.

The academic curriculum offered limited college training and included the study of Latin and English for four years and at least one year of math, science, history, Greek, Bible, and foreign language. In addition to teacher training, the school offered several courses in industrial education including cooking, sewing, construction, theology, and bookkeeping. Though Roger Williams was more accurately a high school or junior college than a university, it played a vital role in Davidson County. Other than Pearl High School, located near downtown, there were no public Black high schools outside of Nashville city limits in Davidson County until the 1930s. In 1927, Roger Williams moved to Memphis to merge with LeMoyne-Owen College.

Continue walking up 21st Avenue to Dixie Place and turn RIGHT to climb the stairs through the West Lawn of the Peabody campus, between West Hall and North Hall. Follow the path and stop when you reach the Peabody Esplanade, with the Wyatt Center on your right. Across the top of the Wyatt Center, look for the building’s original name inscribed at the top: Social and Religious Building.