African American

Founded in 1902 by Wallace Battle, the Okolona Industrial School offered industrial and teacher training for generations of Black men and women in northeastern Mississippi. The institution was one of the most successful industrial schools in the state, having a plant of 380 acres in Chickasaw County and a valuation of nearly a quarter million dollars by the 1920s.

Applying to the University of Mississippi on January 20, 1961, Meredith was immediately rejected after writing in his application that he was a Black man. Unwavering in his mission to be admitted, he reached out to Medgar Evers, field secretary for the NAACP.

Today, legal and institutionally supported racial segregation within places of higher learning feels like a thing of the past. Yet, integration and increased representation of students of color, especially Black students, did not come easily in the Mississippi Delta even after racial segregation was outlawed.

In 2022, more than fifty African Americans were serving in the Mississippi State Legislature, carrying on the legacy of the first Black men who served there in 1870. Mississippi’s first Black legislators were farmers and lawyers, barbers and blacksmiths, teachers and ministers. Some had always known freedom, while others were born into slavery. Some were highly educated elsewhere, and others had never been taught to read because the law in Mississippi forbade it. Many came to Mississippi to help build a more just government, and many were driven out by violence only a few years later.

In the early twentieth century, Black people in Mississippi who aimed to exercise their rights as citizens of the United States had few allies. State and local government officials, acting under the authority of the 1890 state constitution, blocked efforts by black citizens to vote and operated separate schools for White and Black children.