GEORGETOWN Ky. – It wasn’t an obvious match. One college was mostly White in Georgetown. The other was a Black college in Texas.
But bringing the two schools together was something Georgetown College president William Crouch said God told him to do.
With that in mind, it seems fitting that a four-day revival this week will celebrate the partnership that has increased student diversity at Georgetown College, provided more than $1.5 million in scholarships and given the alumni of defunct Bishop College of Dallas a new place to call home.
How did this unique pairing come to be?
Bishop College, a historically Black school, was founded by the Baptist Home Mission Society in 1881 and began a two-year program to train ministers in 1925. In 1961 the school moved from Marshall, Texas, to a 360-acre campus in Dallas. In the mid-1980s, fallout from a suspected financial scandal caused the school to lose access to federal financial programs, according to the Texas Historical Society. It filed for bankruptcy in 1987 and closed the next year.
The legacy of the college far outlived its existence.
The school was known as a place that nurtured students, offering “second and third and fourth chances,” and the alumni took the bankruptcy and closing hard, said Crouch.
