Okolona College

Wallace Battle, who opened the Okolona Industrial School in 1902, spent years touring the North to raise money, and gifts came from Andrew Carnegie and from congregations. In 1921 the Episcopal Church's American Church Institute for Negroes became a partner. In 1925 a teacher, Ulysses S. Baskin, was murdered on commencement day, in a decade of racist harassment of the school. Battle left in 1927. A junior college was added in 1933, and the school closed in 1965 when donations covering most of its budget fell short. Four buildings survive in a National Register district.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Chickasaw Council House — 9.3 mi
  A roadside exhibit on the Natchez Trace Parkway marking the Chickasaw capital of the 1820s and the council house where the 1832 treaty of Pontotoc Creek ended Chickasaw title to Mississippi.
• Tupelo National Battlefield — 16 mi
  A one-acre park on Main Street marking the July 1864 battle of Tupelo, a Union victory that kept Nathan Bedford Forrest away from Sherman's supply line, with Black soldiers among the defenders.
• Elvis Presley Birthplace — 17 mi
  The two-room house in East Tupelo where Elvis Presley was born in 1935, with a museum and the church building the family attended, set near the vanished Black neighborhoods where he first heard the blues.
• Chickasaw Village Site — 18 mi
  A Chickasaw village on a remnant of the Black Belt Prairie beside the Natchez Trace Parkway, with house outlines marked on the ground and signs that speak in Chickasaw voices.

More markers nearby

• Battle of Okolona — steps away
• Siggers High School — 7.6 mi
• Egypt Station — 8.4 mi
• William Colbert's Last Homesite — 10.0 mi