(PNS) Johnson C. Smith University Board of Trustees has announced that Ronald L. Carter will become the university’s 13th president on July 1. Carter will leave Coker College in Hartsville, SC, where he has served as provost and dean of faculty since 1997.

The new president succeeds Dorothy Cowser Yancy, who has led the school since 1994. Carter brings to his new position more than 30 years experience serving students and universities along with an “impressive record of community leadership, academic administration and budget management,” the school said on its Web site.

Upon graduating from Morehouse College in Atlanta in 1971, Carter began his career at Boston University’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Center, where by 1981 he rose to become the school’s youngest dean of students. In the late 1980s, Carter helped relatives of Nelson Mandela gain admission to U.S. colleges and in doing so was compelled to work in South Africa. Prior to Mandela’s release from prison in 1990 and the abolition of apartheid, Carter was named director of health services at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. Within five years he became the school’s dean of students — and one of the first black administrators at the traditionally white institution.