Samford University

In 1841, Samford University was founded as Howard College in Marion, Alabama.[8][9] Some of the land was donated by Reverend James H. DeVotie, who served on the Samford Board of Trustees for fifteen years and as its President for two years.[10][11] The first financial gift, $4,000, was given by Julia Tarrant Barron and both she and her son also gave land to establish the college.[12] The university was established after the Alabama Baptist State Convention decided to build a school for men in Perry County, Alabama. The college's first nine students began studies in January 1842 with a traditional curriculum of language, literature and sciences.[13] In those early years the graduation addresses of several distinguished speakers were published, including those by Thomas G. Keen of Mobile, Joseph Walters Taylor, Noah K. Davis and Samuel Sterling Sherman.[14] In October 1854, a fire destroyed all of the college's property, including its only building.[13][15] While the college recovered from the fire, the Civil War began.[13] Howard College was converted to a military hospital by the Confederate government in 1863.[15] During this time, the college's remaining faculty offered basic instruction to soldiers recovering at the hospital.[13] For a short period after the war, federal troops occupied the college and sheltered freed slaves on its campus. In 1865 the college reopened. Howard College's board of trustees accepted real estate and funding from the city of Birmingham, Alabama in 1887.[16]

Cumberland School of Law in 2006

In 1913, the college became fully and permanently coeducational. Howard College added its School of Music in 1914 and School of Education and Journalism the following year. The college introduced its Department of Pharmacy in 1927. At the time, it was the only program of its kind in the Southeastern United States.[17] During World War II, Howard College hosted a V-12 Navy College Training Program, allowing enlisted sailors to earn college degrees while receiving military training.[13][18] The number of veterans attending the college after the war boosted enrollment beyond capacity. In result, the college was moved to the Shades Valley in Homewood, Alabama. The new campus opened in 1957.[19] In 1961, the college acquired Cumberland School of Law, one of the nation's oldest law schools.[20] In addition to the law school, Howard College added a new school of business and reorganized to achieve university status in 1965.[13] Since the name "Howard University" was already in use, Howard College was renamed in honor of Frank Park Samford, a longtime trustee of the school.[13] In 1973, the university acquired Ida V. Moffett School of Nursing.[21] Samford University established a study center for students to study abroad in Kensington, England in 1984.[22] On September 21, 1989, a Samford University professor, William Lee Slagle, stabbed one of his debating team students to death before going on the run; Slagle was finally captured six months later.[23]

In 1994, Samford's board of trustees voted to allow it to elect its own members. This gave the university formal independence from the Alabama Baptist State Convention, but until 2017 convention leaders retained ex officio seats on the board, were consulted on trustee selection, and the new trustees were presented to the convention for affirmation.[24][25]

As a private, segregated institution, Samford University was to some degree insulated from the activities of leaders and protesters of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and early 1960s. The officers of the Samford Student Government Association challenged a segregated concert held on campus by the Birmingham Symphony by inviting as guests the student government officers of nearby Miles College,[26] a historically black school.

Segregation by private universities was ended by the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act by the US Congress. Initially, the school's leaders declined to express their commitment to desegregation. For example, the university declined to apply for the NDEA Student Loan Program for 1965-66 because it would have to affirm desegregation.[27] Cumberland School of Law faced the greatest immediate risk of losing accreditation. In 1967, it admitted Samford's first black student, Audrey Lattimore Gaston.[28] The entire university proceeded with desegregation..[29] In the fall of 1969 Elizabeth Sloan Ragland became the first African American student to live on campus.[30] On June 1, 2020, the university announced the installation of a memorial honoring "the sacrifices of many African Americans for the mission and vision of Samford University even in days when their efforts were invisible or barely acknowledged" it specifically remembered Gaston and an enslaved servant named "Harry" who died while saving students from the 1854 fire.[31] A few weeks later, as a result of campus conversations in the wake of the death of George Floyd, Westmoreland created a university task force on racial justice.[32]

Dr. Andrew Westmoreland was appointed president of the university in 2006.[33] That year, the Jane Hollock Brock Recital Hall was dedicated as part of the university’s fine arts complex. A new soccer and track facility opened in 2011, part of a decade-long expansion of new athletics facilities that included a tennis center, a basketball arena, a football field house and a softball stadium.[34] For the 2016–17 academic year, the economic and fiscal impacts of the university on Alabama were $424.8 million, 2,424 jobs, $16.1 million in state income and sales taxes, and $6 million in local sales tax.[35] In 2013, the university established a new College of Health Sciences, including Ida V. Moffett School of Nursing, McWhorter School of Pharmacy, the School of Health Professions and the School of Public Health.[36] The university announced the construction of a new facility to house Brock School of Business that year. In 2014, the West Village residence complex opened. That December, the university purchased the adjacent headquarters of Southern Progress, a subsidiary of Time, Inc., that houses the College of Health Sciences.[37][38] The university's long financial connection with the Alabama Baptist State Convention was ended by the university in July 2017 when the trustees announced they would no longer accept funds from the convention.[39] Later that year Samford and the state convention agreed that Samford would no longer present its slate of trustees to the convention for affirmation and that convention officers would no longer have an ex officio position on the board. This ended key aspects of Samford's formal connection to the state convention that had existed for decades.[25] In August 2020, Westmoreland announced he would retire on June 30, 2021.[40]

• Robert Aderholt (1990), United States Congressman from Alabama (1997–present)
• Andrew L. Brasher, United States District Judge (Samford University, Harvard School of Law)
• Charles Crist, former Florida governor, graduated from Cumberland School of Law
• Stephen Louis A. Dillard [58] (1992), Chief Judge, Court of Appeals of Georgia
• Jim Folsom (non-graduate), governor of Alabama from 1947-1951 and 1955-1959
• Cordell Hull, 47th U.S. secretary of state (1933–44), Nobel Peace Prize winner (1945)
• Jody Hunt (1982), United States Assistant Attorney General (2018–present)
• Howell Edmunds Jackson, U.S. Supreme Court justice (1893–95)
• Lem Johns, U.S. Secret Service agent (1954–1976)
• Doug Jones, United States Senator from Alabama (2018–2021)
• Horace Harmon Lurton, U.S. Supreme Court justice (1909–14)
• Nina Miglionico (1932), Birmingham City Council, 1963-1985
• Eric Motley (1996) State Department official[59][60]
• Michael Patrick Mulroy,[61][62] Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Secretary of Defense James Mattis
• Edwin L. Nelson, United States federal judge (Samford University, Cumberland School of Law - 1969)
• Kevin Newsom, judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit (2017–present)
• Stacey E. Pickering, State Auditor of Mississippi since 2008
• Lee Emmett Thomas, mayor of Shreveport, Louisiana (1922-1930) and Speaker of the Louisiana House of Representative (1912-1916); attended Samford when it was Howard College.[63]
• Janie Shores (1992), Judge on the Supreme Court of Alabama, the first woman on that court and considered by Bill Clinton as nominee to the Supreme Court
• Randall Woodfin, mayor of Birmingham, Alabama (Samford University Cumberland School of Law)

• Mary Anderson, actress
• Zane Birdwell (2003), Grammy award-winning recording engineer
• Philip Birnbaum, author and translator of Jewish works
• Wayne Flynt, (1961), Pulitzer Prize-nominated historian
• Elizabeth Futral, opera singer
• Anne George, mystery author
• Karen Fairchild & Kimberly Schlapman of the Country Group Little Big Town
• Tony Hale, actor, Arrested Development, Veep, and Toy Story 4
• Harold E. Martin (1923–2007), (1954) Pulitzer Prize winner for investigative reporting, publisher of the Montgomery Advertiser and the Alabama Journal.
• Gail Patrick, motion picture actress and television producer
• Kristian Stanfill, Christian rock singer-songwriter
• Jeanne Ellison Shaffer, (2007) was an American composer and musician
• Ed Stetzer, is an American author, speaker, researcher, pastor, church planter, and Christian missiologist
• Jon Acuff, author of 2013 New York Times bestseller Start
• Perry Stephens, actor, Loving, The Bold and the Beautiful
• Susan Patterson, international opera star

• Charles Billingsley, Christian singer, worship leader, songwriter, author, worship leader, Thomas Road Baptist Church, Lynchburg, Virginia
• Scott Dawson, founder, Scott Dawson Evangelistic Association; founder, Strength to Stand Conference movement
• Adam W. Greenway, president, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary
• Hershel H. Hobbs, pastor, First Baptist Church, Oklahoma City, president, Southern Baptist Convention (1961-63)[64]
• Fred L. Lowery, Southern Baptist clergyman and author from Bossier City, Louisiana
• David Gordon Lyon, Hollis Chair at Harvard Divinity School and founding curator of Semitic Museum
• Albert Mohler, president, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary

• James Bradberry, professional football player
• Bobby Bowden, college football coach
• Marv Breeding (1952), professional baseball player
• Phillip Ervin, professional baseball player
• Cortland Finnegan, professional football player
• Jennifer Pharr Davis, long-distance hiker and author
• Jimbo Fisher, college football coach
• Sam Goldman, professional football player
• Devlin Hodges, professional football player
• Slick Lollar, professional football player
• Wendell Magee, professional baseball player
• Michael Pierce, professional football player
• Travis Peterson, professional soccer player
• Marc Salyers, professional soccer player
• Jaquiski Tartt, professional football player
• Jeremy Towns, professional football player and physician
• Corey White, professional football player
• Nick Williams, professional football player

• Bubba Cathy, billionaire businessman, Chick-fil-A[65]
• John Crist, comedian[66]
• Deidre Downs, (2002), Miss America 2005.
• Scarlotte Deupree, (2002), Miss Alabama 2002, 1st Runner Up to Miss America
• Amie Beth Dickinson, first runner-up to Heather Whitestone in the 1994 Miss Alabama pageant. When Whitestone was crowned Miss America, Dickinson was elevated to Miss Alabama.
• Marvin Mann, (1954), CEO, Lexmark[67]
• Melinda Toole, (2006), Miss Alabama 2006, 4th Runner Up to Miss America