Roger Williams University (Nashville, Tennessee)

Roger Williams University in Nashville, Tennessee was an historically black college. It was founded in 1866 as the Nashville Institute by the American Baptist denomination, which established numerous schools and colleges in the South. Renamed for Roger Williams, the founder of the First Baptist Church in America, it became the largest Baptist college in the area for educating African Americans. It was founded in a period when Protestant mission groups sponsored numerous educational facilities for freedmen in the South.

By 1874 the college occupied a 28-acre site on a knoll near Hillsboro Pike. In 1905 its main building was destroyed by two fires. The college operated until 1929, when it merged with other institutions.

Daniel W. Phillips, a white minister and freedmen's missionary from Massachusetts, taught the first classes at what was called Nashville Institute. In 1866 the Baptist Home Mission Board sponsored selected African-American men for the first classes here, including Hardin Smith and Martin Winfield from Haywood County, Tennessee. After they returned to their home communities of Nutbush and Brownsville, respectively, they became ministers and founded several Baptist churches in the area, as well as the first school for freedmen in the county.

In 1874 the college, now known as Roger Williams University after the founder of the Baptist Church in Rhode Island, built a campus on a 28-acre site near Hillsboro Pike in Nashville. It operated here until 1905, when two fires destroyed the main building. It moved to another location.

Numerous African Americans who became teachers, ministers, doctors, and other leaders in the South were educated here throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries. Graduates included William Madison McDonald, who became an influential Republican politician in Texas.

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