Smith Robertson School

Jackson's first public school for Black children opened in 1894 as a wooden building and was named in 1903 for Smith Robertson, the city's first Black alderman. Richard Wright and the future civil rights lawyer Jack Young Sr. were among its pupils. After the wooden school burned, a brick one went up in 1909, remodeled in Art Deco style in 1929. It closed in 1971, and a community effort led by Jessie Mosley and Alferdteen Harrison saved the building, which became a museum in 1984 with Mosley as first director.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Farish Street Historic District — steps away
  Jackson's Black business and cultural center, where Medgar Evers kept the NAACP office and furniture-store owners recorded the blues, now a quiet National Register district.
• Mississippi Civil Rights Museum — 0.6 mi
  A state museum in downtown Jackson, opened in 2017 beside the Museum of Mississippi History, that tells the movement from 1945 to 1970 through the people who made it.
• Old Capitol Museum — 0.6 mi
  Mississippi's Greek Revival statehouse of 1839, where the legislature voted to secede, Hiram Revels was elected to the U.S. Senate and the 1890 constitution was written, now a free state museum.
• Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument — 2.9 mi
  A modest ranch house in Jackson's Elraine neighborhood where Medgar Evers was shot in the driveway in 1963, now a unit of the National Park Service.

More markers nearby

• The Alamo Theatre — steps away
• Mt. Helm Baptist Church — steps away
• Mount Helm Baptist Church - Original Site — steps away
• Greenwood Cemetery — 0.3 mi