$150 million Moody family donation is largest single gift ever to an HBCU

Huston-Tillotson University President Dr. Melva K. Wallace still remembers the number she thought she must have misheard.

In her East Austin office, she listened as Elle Moody, the Moody Foundation’s senior vice president of grants, told her the foundation was prepared to commit $130 million to the historically Black institution.

Wallace stared back in stunned silence. Moments later, that figure would climb to a staggering $150 million, turning an already transformative act of generosity into the single largest gift ever made to a historically Black college or university in the United States and the largest in the foundation’s own 83‑year history.

The announcement would not come right away. Over the next several months, Huston‑Tillotson and the Moody Foundation worked quietly on the contours of what such a commitment could mean for a 150‑year‑old campus with just two residence halls, aging buildings, and students for whom a $25,000‑a‑year tuition bill can mean the difference between a degree and dropping out.

When the university finally went public at its President’s Fall Opening Convocation in September 2025—timed to its sesquicentennial—the figures and the framing were explicit: a $150 million donation, the largest single gift ever to a single HBCU and to a private HBCU, anchored in a half‑century relationship between Huston‑Tillotson and a Texas philanthropy that has now pledged $1 billion to transform education across the state by 2035.

For Wallace, a pastor’s daughter who has spoken openly about prayer and providence, the moment felt less like an institutional transaction and more like confirmation. “This gift is a testament to faith, prayer, and the genuine belief in the goodness of others,” she said when the news was made public.

She framed the nine‑figure commitment as both validation of Huston‑Tillotson’s strategic vision and a charge to steward a legacy stretching back to Reconstruction, when the Freedmen’s Aid Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church helped establish schools for newly freed Black Texans. The gift, she insisted, would “completely transform Huston‑Tillotson, as well as the city of Austin, and set us up for success for another 150 years.”

The Moody Foundation’s leaders have been equally emphatic that this was not a sudden burst of largesse but the culmination of a relationship that began in the late 1960s and intensified as Austin’s only HBCU navigated growth, underfunding, and the pressures of a rapidly changing city. Since 1968, the foundation has given more than $1.3 million to Huston‑Tillotson, helping fund the Jackson‑Moody Fine Arts Complex, emergency COVID‑19 support in 2020, and a new HVAC system in the Mary E. Branch Gymnasium in 2024.

“Our family has been part of the university’s past, but we are even more excited to be a part of its promising future,” trustee Ross Moody said, calling the $150 million grant “a catalyst, a spark, the beginning of something transformative for students, this city, and the future of Huston‑Tillotson.”

What the money will do, in concrete terms, is now coming into sharper focus. University and foundation officials say roughly two‑thirds of the gift will go directly into the student experience—most visibly in the form of three new housing facilities that together are expected to add about 800 beds on campus, a dramatic shift for a university that currently enrolls more than 1,000 students but can house only a fraction of them.

The additional beds are designed not just to accommodate growth but to bring commuting students back onto campus, create a more residential learning environment, and relieve the pressure of Austin’s increasingly expensive rental market on low‑ and moderate‑income students. “Because we are celebrating our sesquicentennial, 150 years, it is high time that we recalibrate and improve our campus,” Wallace said.

Alongside the housing build‑out, Huston‑Tillotson plans extensive upgrades to aging academic and administrative buildings—work that leadership describes as overdue modernization rather than cosmetic enhancement. Several outdated facilities are slated for renovation, technology and infrastructure improvements, and accessibility upgrades to better match the demands of contemporary teaching and research. The investment is intended to move the small, private HBCU from a posture of triage to one of long‑term planning, aligning bricks‑and‑mortar decisions with a master plan that had, until now, largely lived on paper. Officials say the gift will allow the university to accelerate projects that might otherwise have taken decades of incremental fundraising to execute.

Scholarships form the other major pillar of the plan. The university expects a significant share of the $150 million to endow new need‑based and merit awards for undergraduates and graduate students, with a clear goal: make it possible for more students to graduate debt‑free. The average cost of tuition at Huston‑Tillotson—about $25,000 a year—has long been a barrier for the largely first‑generation and working‑class students the institution serves. Wallace has argued that in a financial aid landscape where public dollars often fall short, major philanthropy must step in.

The Moody Foundation’s leaders have echoed that view, describing the gift as an investment in human capital that aligns with their larger education portfolio. “We believe in the power of education and its impact on students, Huston‑Tillotson, and Austin,” trustee Elle Moody said.

The timing of the donation is also a bet on an institution whose outcomes are increasingly cited as a national case study. Huston‑Tillotson has been ranked number one among HBCUs for long‑term return on investment for its graduates, a distinction Moody officials highlight when explaining why they chose to make their largest single institutional gift to a relatively small, private campus rather than a flagship public university.

In an era when prospective students and parents scrutinize value, the ROI rankings have become part of the university’s pitch to donors and policymakers alike, evidence that investments in HBCUs can generate outsized economic returns for Black families and the cities they anchor.

Inside the gates of the compact East Austin campus, though, the language is less about rankings and more about continuity. Vice President for Institutional Advancement Linda Y. Jackson, widely regarded as a keeper of Huston‑Tillotson’s institutional memory, likes to remind visitors that the road to a $150 million gift was paved by coins and crumpled bills. She points to the 19th‑century support of the Freedmen’s Aid Society and a 1989 time capsule her colleagues recovered a few years ago, filled with donation cards from Austin residents promising 5 cents, 10 cents, a dollar for the college. The capsule, assembled as part of an African American history course, was meant to demonstrate how deeply Black families in Austin valued education; today, Jackson uses it to show that the culture of giving to Huston‑Tillotson has always been broad, not just deep.

That culture is inscribed in the buildings themselves. The Anthony and Louise Viaer‑Alumni Hall—one of the oldest structures on campus—owes its existence to a $10,000 gift made in the 1910s and to the labor of industrial arts students who manufactured the cinderblocks by hand.

For decades the building stood boarded up and marked for demolition, until a patchwork of alumni donations, historic preservation grants, city and federal economic development funds, church support, and architectural in‑kind contributions allowed Huston‑Tillotson to restore it. Its namesake, Dr. Anthony Viaer, a 1958 graduate, would later give more than $3 million to the university, one of several alumni whose quiet generosity kept doors open through lean years.

The Jackson‑Moody Fine Arts Complex tells a similar story of layered philanthropy. Built with the help of a trustee, Edward R. Jackson, and Moody Foundation donations in 1968 and 1973, the complex marked an early chapter in a relationship that now spans more than five decades.

“It was my great‑grandparents and my great‑great aunt who made the first donation,” Elle Moody has said, describing how earlier generations of her family saw education as a public good that had to include communities of color. What began as a series of targeted grants to a small Black college has since grown into a marquee commitment that both parties frame as emblematic of the foundation’s broader $1 billion education pledge, which also includes major investments in early childhood programs, K‑12 initiatives, and other Texas campuses.

If the past year and a half has been about announcing and defining the Moody gift, the coming decade will be about execution. Foundation officials have said they will work closely with Huston‑Tillotson over at least ten years to phase in the $150 million, monitor impact, and adjust priorities as needs evolve. University leaders talk about the partnership less as a one‑time windfall and more as a long‑term alignment: the gift is designed to underwrite a strategic plan and master plan that already existed, not to impose a new agenda from the outside. Governance documents and public statements emphasize student success, institutional sustainability, and community impact as the lodestars.

At the same time, Huston‑Tillotson is being explicit that even a record‑breaking gift does not close the books on fundraising. “We hope this gift will be a first domino or a catalyst for other donors and other foundations,” Elle Moody said, urging peers to match or complement the foundation’s commitment.

Wallace has been equally blunt that “we can’t do this work alone,” stressing that while $150 million is transformative, it does not eliminate the need for endowed professorships, research funds, and resources to expand academic programs in high‑demand fields. The university is preparing to launch a formal capital campaign to leverage the spotlight the Moody gift has generated, aiming to raise additional funds to fully realize its long‑term vision for campus expansion, program growth, and student support.

For East Austin, a historically Black neighborhood reshaped by decades of gentrification, the stakes are larger than the university’s bottom line. Huston‑Tillotson is both a symbol and a bulwark, one of the last major Black institutions operating on land where Black families were once confined by segregationist housing policies.

Local leaders say significant investment in the campus has ripple effects: more students living and learning on‑site, more faculty and staff anchored in the community, more cultural and civic programming that affirms Black presence in a rapidly changing city. The Moody Foundation’s gift, in that sense, is as much about place as it is about pedagogy.

Viewed from a distance, the story of Huston‑Tillotson’s historic windfall is a tale of big numbers and superlatives. Up close, it is also a story about accumulation: of 5‑cent pledges and $1 cards slipped into collection boxes, of alumni checks written decades after graduation, of trust built over 50 years of quiet collaboration between a small HBCU and a Texas family foundation.

On a February day in 2026, as the university leans into its capital campaign and begins the slow work of turning renderings into residence halls, Wallace still circles back to that first conversation in her office—the misheard number, the stunned silence, the sense that something larger was unfolding than a single gift agreement.

For Huston‑Tillotson, the next 150 years are no longer an abstraction; they are, brick by brick and scholarship by scholarship, coming into view.