Wayland Baptist University

Wayland Baptist traces its start to 1906, when Dr. James Henry Wayland and his wife pledged $10,000 and land for a Baptist school on the South Plains if local Baptists and townspeople raised a further $40,000. The state chartered Wayland Literary and Technical Institute on August 31, 1908, and it opened in 1910 as Wayland Baptist College, teaching 225 students from the primary grades through junior college while its administration building, later named Gates Hall for first president Isaac E. Gates, was still unfinished. Once Plainview had a solid public school system, Wayland stopped teaching the elementary grades; it gained membership in the national junior-college association in 1926, and in 1948 state education officials recognized it as a four-year senior college. During the Depression, president George W. McDonald and the faculty kept the school open by going without pay. In 1951, three years before Brown v. Board of Education, Wayland admitted a Black teacher, Annie Taylor, making it by the Handbook of Texas's account the first college in Texas to integrate voluntarily. Its women's basketball team, the Flying Queens, put together a 131-game winning streak in the 1950s, a run the Women's Basketball Hall of Fame honored in 2013. Wayland opened its first campus outside Texas, in Hawaii, in 1979 and became Wayland Baptist University in 1981. Today it serves students in Plainview and at external campuses across several states and overseas, and it is regarded as the oldest continuously operating college on the Texas High Plains.

Sources: en.wikipedia.orgtshaonline.org