Founded by African Methodist Episcopal ministers in Austin in 1872, Paul Quinn College spent more than a century in Waco before moving in 1990 to southeast Dallas, taking over the campus Bishop College had built in the 1960s and left empty when it closed in 1988. Under President Michael Sorrell the college reinvented itself as an urban work college, famously plowing up its football field to grow food for a neighborhood with few grocery stores. This walk pairs the Bishop-era buildings, including the library and chapel, with the farm and the first new building raised on campus in four decades.
About this site
Paul Quinn College is a private college or university in Dallas, Dallas County. It is one of 18 degree-granting colleges and universities TexasRoam maps in Dallas County.
The site sits at 32.6806, -96.7558 near Dallas. The nearest cataloged historic site is Simpson Family (cemetery), about 0.3 miles away. Others within a short drive include Tarver Cemetery at Five Mile Community, Smith Family, and Lisbon Cemetery.
Paul Quinn College was founded on April 4, 1872, by a small group of African Methodist Episcopal preachers in Austin, who opened a school to educate Black Texans in the years after emancipation, holding classes in churches and private homes. In 1877 the school relocated to Waco and, as Waco College, worked out of one building, training students in trades like blacksmithing, carpentry, tanning and saddle-making. Money raised across AME districts under the influence of Bishop William Paul Quinn bought additional land and broadened the curriculum to Latin, mathematics, music and theology, and when Texas chartered the school in May 1881 it was renamed in the bishop's honor. The Waco campus expanded after 1950 with a church, student union, gymnasium and new dormitories, and in 1972 the college won regional accreditation for the first time. The college moved to southeast Dallas in 1990, occupying the grounds of the closed Bishop College, and it is now the only HBCU in the Dallas–Fort Worth area. After financial troubles and an accreditation fight in the late 2000s, president Michael Sorrell remade the school: it converted its unused football stadium into the WE over ME Farm in partnership with PepsiCo and became the nation's first urban work college, with students holding jobs to hold down debt. Today the small AME-affiliated college is often called the oldest historically Black college west of the Mississippi River, a distinction Wiley University in Marshall also claims.
Paul Quinn College's Waco campus around 1898. Photo: Hawkins, J. R., and African Methodist Episcopal Church, Public domain, via Wikimedia CommonsHistoric view of the girls' dormitory on the Waco campus. Photo: Unknown, book in which the image is published in was edited by W. N. Hartshorn and George W. Penniman., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
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