WILEY COLLEGE. Wiley College, the oldest black college west of the Mississippi River, was established in Marshall, Texas, in 1873 by the Freedman's Aid Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church and chartered in 1882. F. C. Moore was the first president. The college had a white missionary faculty and was administered by whites for its first twenty years. After a reorganization in 1892, Wiley had its first black president, Bishop Isaiah B. Scott, and black teachers gradually replaced the white faculty members. The school offered regular college courses and some vocational training. It offered grades below the college level until 1922 but thereafter functioned solely as an institution of higher education. In 1907 Wiley received the first Carnegie college library west of the Mississippi. Seven of the fourteen buildings on the campus in 1936 were of brick, and the total value of the plant was estimated at $350,000. Enrollment in 1945 was 420. The forty-six-acre campus was improved and modernized during the 1960s with an extensive building program. In 1962 Wiley and Bishop College students held sit-ins at the local Woolworth store. Their activities and the local reaction made national headlines. These demonstrations helped integrate public facilities in Marshall. In 1969 a series of nonviolent student demonstrations over faculty hiring practices, primitive dormitory facilities, and cutbacks in the intercollegiate athletic program brought approximately 100 Texas Rangersqv, local lawmen, and state police to the school on February 24 in a massive and unsuccessful search for concealed weapons in the dorms; the school was closed down for several weeks in February and March of that year. Further demonstrations resulted in the school administration's agreement in August to improve living conditions on campus.
Wiley College, a Christian coeducational institution, had a regular term enrollment of 573 students in 1974 and was accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools, the Texas Education Agency, the university senate of the Methodist church, and the American Medical Association. College affiliations included the Association of American Colleges and Universities, the United Negro Fund, and the Association of Texas Colleges and Universities. In the 1970s and 1980s Wiley offered B.S. and B.A. degrees in education, humanities, natural sciences and mathematics, and social sciences and business. Preprofessional training in medicine, nursing, dentistry, and law was also available; and the college had a program in engineering administered in cooperation with New York University. In addition to the residence program, the college operated Saturday extension classes. The library contained 30,000 volumes in 1969. In 1992 the college enrollment was 417, and the president was David L. Beckley. In 2004 Wiley College had a student body of 552 and a faculty of fifty-six, and Dr. Haywood Strickland was president.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Warmoth T. Gibbs, President Matthew W. Dugan of Wiley College (Marshall, Texas: Firmin-Greer, n.d).
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