Tougaloo, Mississippi · Founded 1869 · Bulldogs
“The 500-acre 'Oasis' north of Jackson where Mississippi's civil-rights movement was planned, plotted, and sung into being — still minting Black doctors, lawyers, and PhDs.”
The Mississippi Department of Archives and History's official short on the March 27, 1961 read-in — the museum-exhibit version of Tougaloo's most famous story.
Author M.J. O'Brien tells the story behind his book on the Nine, which won the Mississippi Historical Society's 2026 Book of the Year.
The official trailer the college's own Reuben V. Anderson Institute for Social Justice featured on tougaloo.edu.
First-person account from Geraldine Edwards Hollis, one of the nine students arrested for reading in 1961.
Recordnet interview with Geraldine Hollis on how the sit-in ignited the Jackson movement.
Documentary short on the 1961 arrests and why the Nine's contribution was buried for decades.
2026 short-form retelling built on the Smithsonian's reporting — how nine teenagers desegregated a city's libraries.
The Tougaloo College Concert Choir performing at Alfred Street Baptist Church in Alexandria, Virginia.
The Concert Choir led by Ann Marie McPhail in a holiday performance.
The spring concert the college itself promoted — the choir in Woodworth Chapel tradition.
Jackson State's Concert Chorale and Tougaloo's choirs singing together — the two Jackson HBCUs in one room.
The choir on the road, carrying the singing tradition of the movement to Chicago.
Class of 1968 — U.S. Congressman from Mississippi; longest-serving African-American elected official in the state; chaired the House Homeland Security Committee. Began his activism in SNCC as a Tougaloo student.
First African American to sit on the Mississippi Supreme Court; namesake and funder of the college's Institute for Social Justice.
Physician, MacArthur 'genius' award recipient, and founder of the Jackson Medical Mall — a national model for community health care.
President and CEO of the NAACP.
Class of 1964 — sociologist, civil-rights activist, and the first woman to serve as president of Howard University.
Founder of the Boys Choir of Harlem.
Astrophysicist and science communicator.
Engineer and educator.
Mayor of Flint, Michigan — led the city through the water crisis.
Acclaimed actress (attended Tougaloo).
Civil-rights lawyer and appeals court judge.
Former Mississippi Secretary of State.
Class of 1963 — civil-rights activist who directed the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.
Author of the classic memoir 'Coming of Age in Mississippi' (class of 1964).
Civil-rights activist and candidate for U.S. Senate in New York.
Past General President of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc. and past president of Alcorn State University.
Class of 1973 — the college's 13th president and first woman president; now president emerita.
Judge — among the Tougaloo-trained jurists serving Mississippi courts.
Judge — part of the college's deep bench in the Mississippi judiciary.
Physician — Tougaloo produces over 40% of the physicians and dentists practicing in Mississippi.
Planter John Boddie built a grand Italianate mansion about seven miles north of Jackson to be the centerpiece of his slave plantation. It was designed to anchor an empire built on enslaved labor. Nine years later that same mansion would become the first classroom of a school built to undo everything the plantation stood for.
The Christian abolitionist American Missionary Association — the organization born out of the Amistad case — commissioned former Union officer Allen P. Huggins to find land for a normal-agricultural school for freedmen. Huggins found the old Boddie plantation and negotiated its purchase from owner George McKee for $10,500, money provided by the Freedmen's Bureau. On ground where Black people had been held in bondage, the AMA opened a school to educate them — the freedmen had been denied all access to education before the Civil War.
The Mississippi State Legislature granted the school a charter under the ambitious name Tougaloo University — a lofty aspiration for a young Black school in Reconstruction Mississippi. The name reflected the AMA's belief that freedmen deserved not just trade training but genuine higher education. That ambition would be scaled back to 'College' in 1916, but the reach for the top never left the place.
The Reverend Frank G. Woodworth became president and would serve 25 years — the longest tenure in the college's history. The Queen Anne-style Woodworth Chapel that bears his name became the most famous room in Mississippi's civil-rights movement. Woodworth steadied the school through the violent rollback of Reconstruction and the entrenchment of Jim Crow.
The state of Mississippi discontinued its funding for Tougaloo, a blow that could have closed the school. Instead the Normal Department was recognized as a teacher-training school, and Tougaloo doubled down on its core mission: preparing Black teachers for Black Mississippi. Graduates who completed 18 semester hours of education courses would eventually earn a lifelong professional teaching license.
Tougaloo began offering genuine college credit for the first time, a milestone on the long road to full accreditation. Earning the Southern Association's recognition would take decades more — improvements to the library, degreed faculty, and endowment all had to come first. State accreditation finally landed in the 1930s.
The school formally scaled back its charter name from Tougaloo University to Tougaloo College, matching what the institution actually was. The name change stuck for nearly four decades. It was a humbler name, but by then the college's reputation among Black educators across the South was anything but humble.
Dr. Ernst Borinski, a Jewish refugee from Hitler's Germany, joined the Tougaloo faculty and taught sociology until his death in 1983. A year later he founded the Social Science Laboratory in the basement of an academic building — a classroom, roundtable conference hall, and reading center stocked with the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, and works by Black and African authors many students had never been allowed to see. Borinski used his outsider status to cross Mississippi's color line on behalf of social change, and his lab became the intellectual engine room of the coming movement.
Borinski created the Social Science Forum for open dialogue on political, social, and economic issues, drawing large interracial audiences at a time when Black and white Mississippians could meet almost nowhere else without fear of reprisal. The speaker list reads like a syllabus of the century: John Kenneth Galbraith, Eudora Welty, Medgar Evers, William Kunstler, James Baldwin, Hodding Carter Jr., and Martin Luther King Jr. Students prepped in Borinski's seminars, then ate dinner with the speakers before the lectures — for many, their first real conversation across the color line.
Tougaloo merged with the Southern Christian Institute of Edwards, Mississippi, whose mission and goals closely matched its own. The combined school was called Tougaloo Southern Christian College. The merger strengthened the institution eight years before it would reclaim the simpler Tougaloo College name in 1962.
Dr. Adam Daniel Beittel, formerly Dean of the Chapel at Beloit College, became president — and unlike most Southern college heads, he openly supported the student movement. When his students moved toward direct action, Beittel stood with them rather than expelling them. The board would remove him for it in 1964, but his stand made Tougaloo the rare Southern campus where the administration and the movement were on the same side.
Nine Tougaloo students — Meredith Anding Jr., James Bradford, Alfred Cook, Geraldine Edwards, Janice Jackson, Joseph Jackson Jr., Albert Lassiter, Gloria Pierce, and Ethel Sawyer — members of the campus NAACP Youth Council, walked into the all-white Jackson Municipal Library, sat down, and read. Medgar Evers had helped them plan it; they aimed to be arrested only for breach of peace, and they were — the first time that charge had ever been brought in a Mississippi courtroom. They were held overnight, convicted, fined $100 each, and given suspended 30-day sentences. Meanwhile Jackson State students staged sympathy protests, and on the third day police turned dogs, billy clubs, and tear gas on peaceful supporters outside the courthouse — one of the first uses of police dogs on a peaceful gathering in the civil-rights era — all while Mississippi staged a lavish centennial of its secession from the Union. The NAACP used the case to force desegregation of the Jackson library system in 1962, and Myrlie Evers would later say the change of tide in Mississippi began with the Tougaloo Nine.
The school dropped 'Southern Christian' and became Tougaloo College again — the name it has carried ever since. The same year, the legal and moral pressure from the Tougaloo Nine's case cracked the Jackson library system's color bar. What nine students started with books in their hands finished with an integrated public library system.
On June 12, 1963, NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers was gunned down in his Jackson driveway by a white supremacist. Tougaloo had been his base of operations — President Beverly Hogan later said plainly that 'Medgar Evers spent a great deal of his time on the campus of Tougaloo College organizing and devising strategies for voter education, voter registration and the move forward for an integrated society.' The campus was the movement's safe haven and strategy room: the one place in Mississippi where Black and white people could meet, plan, and eat together without fear of reprisal. Thirty years later, his widow Myrlie Evers would entrust the family's home to the college's care.
In April 1964, Joan Baez performed in Woodworth Chapel before the most integrated audience the chapel had ever held — in a state where integrated gatherings were still dangerous. The chapel's podium had already hosted Ralph Bunche, Julian Bond, Stokely Carmichael, James Baldwin, Roy Wilkins, Martin Luther King Jr., Medgar Evers, Robert F. Kennedy, and Fannie Lou Hamer; its stage had carried Harry Belafonte, Leontyne Price, and Frank Sinatra. Many call Woodworth Chapel the origin point of Mississippi's civil-rights movement.
Dr. George A. Owens, a Tougaloo alumnus who had captained the school's football team and served as its business manager, became the college's first African American president after a year as acting president. He succeeded Beittel, who had been pushed out for supporting civil-rights activists. Owens led for 19 years, increasing funding and campus housing — and paid a price for the visibility: he received threats and his campus home was bombed. The gymnasium and the George A. and Ruth B. Owens Health and Wellness Center now carry his and his wife's names.
The L. Zenobia Coleman Library opened in 1972, the first of three concrete modernist buildings from architect Gunnar Birkerts's sweeping 1966 master plan — the others being Jennie Renner Residence Hall and Residence Hall B. The full plan would have demolished Tougaloo's historic buildings for a dense three-dimensional matrix of new structures; after the library and the two dorms, the plan was abandoned. Students and alumni had fought for the old buildings, and the historic heart of campus — the Mansion, Ballard Hall, Galloway Hall, Woodworth Chapel — survived. Ballard Hall itself had been moved a second time in 1970 to make way for Renner Hall, and still serves as the home of the music and drama departments.
Myrlie Evers, widow of Medgar Evers and later national chairwoman of the NAACP, gave the family's Jackson home — the house in whose driveway her husband was murdered — to Tougaloo College. It was an extraordinary act of trust: the home of Mississippi's most famous civil-rights martyr placed in the care of the college that had been the movement's sanctuary. Tougaloo would steward it for a quarter century before the federal government came calling.
Dr. Beverly Wade Hogan, a 1973 Tougaloo graduate and native Mississippian, became the 13th president and the first woman to lead the college. Under her 17-year tenure the retention rate hit 89%, well above the national average; Tougaloo ranked among the top five HBCUs whose graduates earn PhDs in the sciences; and 66% of graduates entered graduate or professional school immediately. She presided over the run-up to the sesquicentennial and kept the college's civil-rights identity at the center of its brand.
Scholar and activist Angela Davis delivered the presidential lecture on October 22, 2015, to a packed Woodworth Chapel with overflow crowds sent to a nearby hall. She opened with a roll call of movement veterans born of Mississippi — Medgar Evers, Fannie Lou Hamer, Emmett Till — then pressed the audience on mass incarceration and the prison system. Fifty years after the movement's peak, the chapel was still doing what it had always done: holding the hardest conversations in the state.
When the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum opened in Jackson in December 2017, images and artifacts of the Tougaloo Nine were given prominent display in its 'A Tremor in the Iceberg' gallery. The students arrested for reading in 1961 were finally enshrined in the state's official telling of its own history. The Mississippi Department of Archives and History later produced a short film on the Nine for its 'Scenes from Mississippi History' classroom series.
Tougaloo celebrated 150 years with a full sesquicentennial program honoring its liberal-arts tradition and its movement history, naming several interior and exterior campus spaces along the way. The same year, the federal government moved to designate the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home a National Monument, with Tougaloo and the National Park Service finalizing the transfer of the home Myrlie Evers had given the college in 1993. Dr. Carmen J. Walters was named the 14th president, succeeding the retiring Beverly Hogan.
In December 2020, philanthropist MacKenzie Scott gave Tougaloo $6 million — then the largest gift from a named donor in the college's history — with no strings attached. The college put $2.5 million into merit and need-based scholarships, $1.15 million into upgrades across five campus facilities, and the rest into a fund for scholarships, technology, and infrastructure; the gift then attracted millions more from other donors, including $1 million from TikTok for public-health scholarships. Six months earlier, in June 2020, the college had opened the Reuben V. Anderson Institute for Social Justice on the library's second floor — named for the Tougaloo alumnus who became the first African American on the Mississippi Supreme Court — housing the pre-law program and the college's social-justice, public-policy, and leadership programs.
Netflix CEO Reed Hastings and his wife, producer Patty Quillin, gave $10 million — the largest single-donor gift in Tougaloo's history — and the endowment grew from $14 million in 2019 to $31 million by 2023. On the court, the men's basketball team went 29-1, won the Gulf Coast Athletic Conference tournament, and earned a 6-seed in the NAIA national championship. The brand-new esports program won Fall 2022 and Spring 2023 championships in its first year. Tougaloo also made Forbes' Top 10 list of most financially improved colleges in 2021 and launched new programs in cybersecurity, data science, and business accounting.
Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett delivered the 2025 commencement keynote on the Campus Green in front of Woodworth Chapel, telling more than 100 graduates that Black people 'have always had to fight for everything that they got.' She was greeted on campus by members of Delta Sigma Theta, her sorority, before the ceremony. Three months later, on August 5, 2025, Tougaloo signed an agreement with the Jacktown All Star Band to create the first band in the 155-year history of the college — no football program ever meant no marching band until now. Founder Jonathan Garland leads the new program, with JAB scholarships giving band members a direct path to a Tougaloo education.
Dr. Corey Wiggins became president of Tougaloo College, succeeding acting president Dr. Donzell Lee (2023–2026), who had stewarded the college after Carmen Walters's departure. He inherits a 157-year-old institution that the college itself now calls 'the Cradle of the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi' — with a new band, a growing endowment, and the same 500 acres where it all started.
No named rivalry game could be verified against the school's own records. On the court, the Bulldogs' back-to-back Gulf Coast Athletic Conference men's basketball titles made every conference matchup a target game — Wiley's 2024 game notes called Tougaloo the 'two-time defending regular season champion' and the team to beat. Historic conference ties run deepest with Dillard, Philander Smith, and Rust, fellow small private HBCUs who have shared leagues with Tougaloo since the South Central Athletic Conference days of the 1930s.
For 155 years Tougaloo had no band at all — with no football program, there was never a traditional marching band. That changed August 5, 2025, when the college signed a memorandum of understanding and lifetime contract with the Jacktown All Star Band LLC to create the first band in school history, with JAB scholarships giving band members a direct path to a Tougaloo education. The band performs at school events, athletic games, and local parades, and is meant to compete regionally and nationally — the sound of a new tradition being built from scratch.
Founder and director of the Jacktown All-Star Band; leads Tougaloo's new program under the August 5, 2025 partnership agreement.
Tougaloo's Greek scene is unusually tidy: eight NPHC organizations, four fraternities and four sororities, representing "75+ Years of Tradition" per the college — and remarkably, seven of the eight chapters were chartered within a 32-month window from February 1948 to October 1950. The postwar Greek boom hit Tougaloo almost all at once: Gamma Psi Deltas (February 16, 1948), Rho Epsilon Ques (March 31, 1948), Beta Rho Sigmas (May 18, 1948), Gamma Upsilon Alphas (February 27, 1949), Gamma Rho Kappas (April 16, 1949), Gamma Omicron AKAs (April 23, 1949), and Nu Beta Zetas (October 16, 1950), with Theta Gamma SGRho completing the set. The college requires a 2.80 GPA and mandatory anti-hazing workshops before intake.
Still digging this up — check back soon.
Ballard Hall — the oldest building intended for academic use on campus, an Italianate structure — was moved a second time in 1970 to clear ground for the new Jennie Renner Residence Hall. Despite two moves, its front entrance stair hall and second-floor auditorium remain intact, and it still houses the music and drama departments.
The Coleman Library opened in 1972 as the flagship of architect Gunnar Birkerts's 1966 master plan — a concrete modernist building named for the college's longtime librarian (1933–1969). It was one of only three Birkerts buildings ever constructed before the plan was abandoned; the historic core it was meant to replace survived instead.
The historic heart of the 500-acre campus — the 1860 Tougaloo Mansion (individually listed as an excellent example of Italianate architecture), Italianate Ballard Hall, Neoclassical Galloway Hall, and the Queen Anne Woodworth Chapel, described by the National Park Service as one of the finest examples of Queen Anne religious architecture in Mississippi — is recognized on the National Register of Historic Places. The Mansion itself has been restored after its journey from slave-plantation centerpiece to college landmark.
Opened in June 2020 on the second floor of the library, the institute is named for the Tougaloo alumnus who became the first African American on the Mississippi Supreme Court — and who helped fund it. It houses the pre-law program plus public-policy, leadership-development, and social-justice programs, and was created in direct response to the police killings of 2020.
The college brought in a landscape architect to rework outdoor spaces — trees, plantings, walks, and landscapes across the 500 acres — and added exterior banners and signage identifying major campus facilities. Small move, big signal: a campus that had long been 'off the beaten path' started marking itself for visitors.
$1.15 million of MacKenzie Scott's $6 million went to significant upgrades across five campus facilities, with the remainder of the gift seeding a fund for scholarships, technology, and infrastructure improvements. The no-strings gift let the college spend on unglamorous necessities — roofs, systems, tech — that foundations rarely fund.
The college invested over $4 million renovating and upgrading Galloway Hall, the New Women's, Renner, and A.A. Branch residence halls, Jamerson Hall, the Zenobia Coleman Library, Pope Cottage, the George A. and Ruth B. Owens Health and Wellness Center, and Woodworth Chapel itself. Renovations to the Warren Hall cafeteria and additional windows for Woodworth Chapel were underway as the program continued.
As part of the 150th anniversary celebration, the college formally named several interior and exterior spaces across campus — writing the institution's history onto its buildings during the sesquicentennial year.
The faculty lineage that matters most at Tougaloo is the Borinski line — the Social Science Laboratory (1948) and Social Science Forum (1952) tradition of movement scholarship carried on by the history and social-sciences faculty. Current head coaches and the athletic director could not be verified against the school's own records and are omitted rather than guessed.
Current president per the college's official roster.
Stewarded the college through the mid-2020s transition.
Announced the August 2025 band partnership: 'We are not just adding music to the campus — we are expanding the heartbeat of this institution.'
Historian of the Tougaloo Nine era; chairs the department that carries the college's movement scholarship.
Leads the division descended from Ernst Borinski's Social Science Laboratory tradition.
Five hundred acres at the northern edge of Jackson, moss-draped oaks, and a chapel where history keeps happening — Tougaloo feels less like a campus and more like hallowed ground that happens to hold classes. Students browse one of the most acclaimed African and African American art collections in the Southeast, perform theater (including an August Wilson production directed by professor Kimberly Morgan-Myles, Miss Mississippi 2007), and live in an environment the college describes as feeding 'the spirit as well as the mind.' It's small — around 700 students — which means the movement history isn't a museum exhibit; it's the air.