Galloway Hall

At the turn of the twentieth century, increased enrollment in the Combined Normal and Industrial Department at Wilberforce University, which later became Central State University, spurred construction of new teaching and dormitory facilities, and Galloway Hall was completed in 1906 with an auditorium and a tower with chimes and a clock. Its auditorium hosted many famous performers, including opera singer Leontyne Price, Robert McFerrin, the first African American male lead with the New York Metropolitan Opera, actors Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis, comedian and civil rights activist Dick Gregory, and composer and conductor Duke Ellington. It also drew noted authors and intellectuals such as historian John Hope Franklin, writer, poet, actor, and playwright Maya Angelou, Lerone Bennett, author, historian, and editor of EBONY Magazine, and writer and essayist James Baldwin. Other notable speakers included civil rights figures such as Thurgood Marshall, then senior legal counsel for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and later a Supreme Court Justice, Daisy Bates, journalist, president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and advisor to the Little Rock Nine, and A. Phillip Randolph, International President of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. The building was named for Dr. William Galloway, president of the Combined Normal and Industrial Department's Board of Trustees, and in 1974 the famed Xenia tornado cut a wide swath through Greene County and destroyed the building, leaving only the tower.

Wilberforce, Ohio · United States