Wayland Baptist University (WBU) is a private Baptist university based in Plainview, Texas. It is affiliated with the Baptist General Convention of Texas (Southern Baptist Convention). Wayland Baptist has 11 campuses in five Texas cities, six states, American Samoa, and Kenya. Chartered in 1908, it had about 4,000 students in 2021, including about 900 students on its main campus. History In 1906, James Henry Wayland and his wife offered US$10,000 and of land in Plainview if the Staked Plains Baptist Association and the citizens of the city would raise an additional $40,000. In 1910, the school offered its first classes, though the administration building was incomplete. A During the school's first term, a total of 225 students were taking classes in primary education through junior college. After a public school system was well established in Plainview, the elementary grades were discontinued. Wayland Baptist was admitted to the American Association of Junior Colleges in 1926 and would later be approved as a senior college by the Texas Department of Education and the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools. The university is accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools and the Texas Education Agency for teacher education training. The school is the oldest institution of higher education in continuous existence on the High Plains of Texas. When a run on the banks during the Great Depression threatened to close the school, George W. McDonald, the fifth president of the school, other administration officials, and faculty agreed to forgo pay to continue educating students, trusting God to supply their needs. The school admitted no Black students until 1951, when a teacher, Mrs. Annie Taylor of Floydada, Texas, asked the college whether she could fulfill continuing education requirements at the college. She enrolled with the consent of James W. "Bill" Marshall, the school's sixth president, making Wayland the first four-year liberal arts college in the former Confederate states to integrate voluntarily. This action came three years before the Supreme Court's decision to ban public school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education. The Malouf Abraham Family Arts Center on the Wayland campus was endowed by the family of the late State Representative Malouf Abraham Sr., and his son, Malouf Abraham Jr., a retired allergist and active art collector from Canadian, the seat of Hemphill County in the northeastern Texas Panhandle. In 1969, a musical scholarship was established at Wayland in honor of