Tougaloo College: The Campus That Wouldn't Yield
Near Jackson, Mississippi
Seven miles north of Jackson, on land that had once been an antebellum cotton plantation, the American Missionary Association founded a school in eighteen sixty-nine for the formerly enslaved people of Mississippi. They named it Tougaloo University. Within two years the Mississippi Legislature had granted it a charter. It was a quiet beginning for what would become one of the most consequential campuses in the history of American civil rights.
For much of the twentieth century, Tougaloo College existed in a kind of protected tension with the state of Mississippi. Because it was a private institution with Northern denominational backing, it had slightly more room to maneuver than public Black colleges, which were directly controlled by the segregationist state government. That margin of safety, narrow as it was, made Tougaloo a gathering point.
On March twenty-seventh, nineteen sixty-one, nine Tougaloo students walked into the whites-only Jackson Public Library and sat down to read. They were trained in nonviolent civil disobedience by Medgar Evers, the Jackson branch president of the NAACP. When the police arrived and ordered them to leave, they did not move. All nine were arrested and charged with breach of the peace. At their hearing two days later, police turned dogs and nightsticks on a peaceful crowd of supporters outside the courthouse. The Tougaloo Nine's action led directly to a federal lawsuit, and in June of nineteen sixty-two, a federal judge ordered the Jackson Public Library to desegregate.
That was one episode. Over the following decade the Tougaloo campus hosted planning meetings with Martin Luther King Junior, Robert Kennedy, James Baldwin, Fannie Lou Hamer, Medgar Evers, and hundreds of others. It was the final staging area for James Meredith's March Against Fear in nineteen sixty-six. Faculty were fired for activism, buildings were surveilled by state agents, and the college was under constant pressure. It did not yield. Tougaloo remains a working college today, and its campus is a National Historic District.
