David Bancroft Johnson was twenty-eight and the superintendent of Columbia's schools when he started Winthrop in 1886. His pitch was practical: South Carolina, devastated by the Civil War and barely emerged from Reconstruction, had no system for training teachers and was educating its children poorly. Boston's Peabody Education Board, which had been pouring money into post-war Southern schooling, gave him $1,500 to open a training school for white women teachers - the racial exclusion was an explicit founding condition, reflecting both the Peabody Board's politics and South Carolina's. The school opened that year as the Winthrop Training School. By 1891 it had been renamed the South Carolina Industrial and Winthrop Normal College; by 1893 the Winthrop Normal and Industrial College of South Carolina. In 1895 the state bought the school a campus in Rock Hill, twenty-five miles from Charlotte. Tillman Hall, built in 1894 and now on the National Register, is the oldest building on the grounds.

For seventy years Winthrop remained what it had been founded to be - a women's college, racially segregated by state law. That ended in 1964, when Cynthia Plair Roddey became the first Black student admitted. (The desegregation came a year before the federal Civil Rights Act made it inevitable; the state had simply seen the writing on the wall after the Friendship Nine sit-in three miles away in downtown Rock Hill in 1961.) A decade later, in 1974, the college admitted men. The name shortened to Winthrop College, and in 1992 it became Winthrop University. By the 2020s the student body was roughly seventy percent women and a quarter African-American - the long shadow of the founding mission still visible in those proportions, but the exclusions long since gone.

Winthrop's main campus sits on 100 acres in downtown Rock Hill. The 317-acre Recreational and Research Complex, about a mile northeast, holds the disc golf course that has hosted the United States Disc Golf Championship every year since 1999 - the sport's longest-running and most prestigious tournament, played on the same wooded fairways for twenty-six straight years. The Winthrop Coliseum, home to the basketball program, served as the practice site for the Carolina Panthers during their inaugural 1995 NFL season - the team installed a natural grass field behind the Coliseum and converted space inside into coaching offices. The Big South Conference basketball program - the Winthrop Eagles - has made eleven NCAA tournament appearances, beating Notre Dame in 2007 for their first March Madness win. Garnet and gold.

In February 2024 Winthrop announced something so unusual that the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post both sent reporters to Rock Hill to figure out what was going on. The university would offer the country's first Division I athletic scholarships to play cornhole - the wooden-board beanbag game that has been a cookout fixture for decades and which the American Cornhole League has recently been pushing as a competitive sport with prize purses and ESPN coverage. Two high school players signed. The reporters were polite about it. The Winthrop administration argued that cornhole is a sport with measurable skill, real coaching, and an existing professional scene; the broader sports world treated the announcement as either delightful or absurd, depending on the writer. Either way, it was new. Winthrop, founded in 1886 to train teachers in a single state's segregated school system, was now experimenting with what college athletics might mean in the next century.