When I first started working for the Carl Spain Center, I was a senior in college. Considering it was the inaugural staff position within the center, there was little precedent for the job. As a new center on campus, our priority was to build our familiarity with the institution while also increasing the institution’s familiarity with us. One aspect of this effort was to build familiarity with budgeting, accounting, and financial operations. Though I may have masked it well, I was admittedly a bit nervous about this aspect of the job. I didn’t want to be responsible for messing anything up. But as I would learn, as is almost always the case, Founding Director Dr. Jerry Taylor had a plan. And that plan included a meeting with Dr. Orneita Burton.
Having spent a few years on campus already, I was familiar with Dr. Burton and her work in COBA— the College of Business Administration at ACU. I had interacted with her before, knew of her advocacy work on campus, and had heard Dr. Taylor alongside so many others who worked at ACU speak highly of her. However, as a student, it is rare that you get to peek behind the veil of the academic institution you’re attending to understand the full extent of a professor’s impact. But it did not take long for me to understand why Dr. Burton’s reputation had been so glowing, why Dr. Taylor had invited her to support us in our organizational endeavors, and why she was an inaugural member of the Carl Spain Center’s Advisory Committee. Her character was beyond reproach.
Three characteristics come to mind when I think about Dr. Burton: Wisdom, integrity, and quiet strength. Over the years, I had the privilege of directly benefiting from these characteristics and seeing them shine up close. With patience, she imparted her wisdom to me as a young staff-member trying to navigate a system with many moving parts. Through her mentorship, she demonstrated for me the value of a life marked by integrity. And in her teaching and advocacy, I learned that the true measure of one’s status is not in their stature, gender, or temperament, but rather in their unwavering faithfulness to truth. In all that she did, Dr. Burton carried with her a quiet strength. But don’t be fooled. Though her words may have been softly spoken, they were steeped in truth and infused with power.
In 2020, shortly after the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd, Dr. Burton spoke at the Carl Spain Center’s rally for unity. With concision and precision, she set the stage for the gathering. “This evening, we have come together to experience a sharing of truth,” she told the crowd of hundreds gathered in the ACU amphitheater, “so that we can walk with God in caring for each other.” In her remarks, she recognized that a part of living faithfully in one’s academic, civic, and institutional environments includes a commitment to the truth. “We are here to learn to take spiritual action” for “those who are hurting… troubled… lost,” she told the crowd.
She urged them of the importance of being aware of the actions that contribute to the loss and hindrance of life, influence, opportunity, and futures for “many people of color who have to endure [such actions] every day.” And she encouraged the audience to “listen without judgement, without blame, and without the indifference that can come with a comfortable life.”
Since I learned of Dr. Burton’s death on October 5th, 2025, I have rewatched her remarks from the center’s rally 5 years ago. I encourage you to do the same, alongside her lecture for the center later the same year. Though brief, her words are prescient:
“Many of us have very peaceful lives in the midst of a world that otherwise may be torn and shattered. Therefore, we ask God to help us to empty our hearts and our souls so that things that we have thought about and maybe felt in the past are gone. Perhaps those things that we think about and feel today are also gone. Because many of these things blind us to the truth and especially the truth that is rooted in God’s word.”
“Let’s listen to God’s word and let us hear what he says to us,” she said. Dr. Burton then offered a prayer:
“Ephesians Chapter 3, verses 17-21: And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all of God’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.”
Finally, she ended her remarks with a reminder:
“This is not about us, it is not about what we believe, and it is not about what we think. It is about humbly bowing before the great God our father and asking him for his will to be done in a troubled and fallen world. May God’s words of spiritual action be real to us, just as the goodness of God has made us perfect in times like these.”
The Carl Spain Center is forever indebted to the wisdom, integrity, and quiet strength of Dr. Orneita Burton. We strive, as she did, to disrupt comfort in our own lives and live out the truth of God’s word.
Tryce Prince, Executive Director
ACU Carl Spain Center
A Legacy of Service
Dr. Jerry Taylor, Founding Director of the Carl Spain Center, worked alongside Dr. Orneita Burton for over 20 years. We asked him to reflect on the legacy of Dr. Burton. To view his tribute, click the image below:
“May we find the strength in her legacy: a life well lived and wholly dedicated to the well-being of others.”
– Dr. Jerry Taylor