Alcorn State: America's First Public HBCU Land-Grant College
Mississippi
Just outside Lorman sits one of the most historically significant campuses in the United States. Alcorn State University was founded in eighteen seventy-one, in the years immediately following the Civil War, as Mississippi worked to educate the descendants of enslaved people. It was named for James L.
Alcorn, the sitting governor of Mississippi. Alcorn became the first public historically Black land-grant institution in the country, a distinction it still holds. The university sits on seventeen hundred acres and has branches in Vicksburg and Natchez.
In eighteen seventy-eight it became Alcorn Agricultural and Mechanical College, and in nineteen seventy-four it took the name Alcorn State University. It remains one of the oldest and most storied HBCUs in America.
