Dr. Jane Ellen McAllister

Jane Ellen McAllister was the daughter of a mail carrier and a teacher, and relatives who had been enslaved taught her what she called a tradition of overcoming. She graduated from Talladega College in 1919 at nineteen, its youngest graduate. In 1929 she became the first Black woman to earn a doctorate from Teachers College, Columbia, with a thesis on Black teachers in Louisiana. She spent decades pressing states and funders, including the Rosenwald and Jeanes funds, to pay for Black teacher training, and taught at Jackson State from 1951 to 1970. She died in Vicksburg in 1996.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Old Court House Museum — 0.3 mi
  Vicksburg's Greek Revival courthouse of 1860, raised on a hilltop with the labor of enslaved artisans and now a private local-history museum heavy on Confederate relics.
• Vicksburg National Military Park — 1.4 mi
  A 16-mile tour road through the trenches of the 47-day siege of 1863, with a national cemetery and the story of the thousands of enslaved people who reached freedom behind Union lines.
• USS Cairo Gunboat and Museum — 1.6 mi
  The raised hull of a Union river ironclad sunk by a mine in the Yazoo in 1862, displayed at Vicksburg National Military Park with the artifacts the river mud preserved.

More markers nearby

• St. Mary's Catholic Church — steps away
• St. Mary's Catholic School — steps away
• Jackson Street MB Church — steps away
• Newit Vick's Original Vicksburg — 0.2 mi