Tougaloo College
Near Jackson, Mississippi
Tougaloo College sits on five hundred acres of former plantation land north of Jackson, Mississippi, and the contrast is not accidental. The college was founded in eighteen sixty-nine by the American Missionary Association on a tract purchased specifically to provide higher education to freed Black people in one of the most hostile states in the nation. The land had been a plantation. Now it would school the people who had worked it in bondage.
For nearly a century, Tougaloo operated as what its supporters called a "citadel of freedom" in Mississippi. Faculty, many of them white Northerners in the early decades, faced social ostracism and occasional violence. The college provided education at a time when the state refused to fund comparable schooling for Black Mississippians, and it attracted students who had no other avenue to a four-year degree.
The school's role in the Civil Rights Movement is extraordinary. In March of nineteen sixty-one, nine Tougaloo students walked into the whites-only section of the Jackson Public Library and sat down to read. They were arrested. The Tougaloo Nine, as they became known, were among the first organized sit-ins in Mississippi and directly inspired the Freedom Rides and subsequent Jackson campaigns. Medgar Evers, the NAACP field secretary who was assassinated in his driveway in June of nineteen sixty-three, was deeply connected to Tougaloo and worked with its students and faculty. Anne Moody, whose memoir "Coming of Age in Mississippi" became one of the defining documents of the movement, was a Tougaloo student.
The college also hosted concerts by artists who were blacklisted in white Mississippi venues, bringing Nina Simone and other performers to an audience that otherwise had no access to them. Artists including Margaret Walker and painters connected to the Chicago Renaissance visited in residence. Today Tougaloo enrolls roughly seven hundred students, remains a historically Black liberal arts institution, and maintains the historic district on its campus on the National Register of Historic Places.
