Utica

Utica was home to a school for Black students modeled on Tuskegee. William Henry Holtzclaw, born into a poor family of former slaves in Alabama in 1870, began raising money and organizing builders there in 1902. Students worked part of their tuition, and funders included Andrew Carnegie. Holtzclaw organized an annual Negro Farmers Conference starting in 1905, published two newspapers, and sent out a student singing group, the Utica Jubilee singers. His 1915 autobiography, The Black Man's Burden, followed Booker T. Washington's Up from Slavery.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Vicksburg National Military Park — 21 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.
• Old Court House Museum — 23 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.
• USS Cairo Gunboat and Museum — 24 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.
• Farish Street Historic District — 28 mi
  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.

More markers nearby

• Utica Normal and Industrial School — 4.6 mi
• Federals Occupy Rocky Springs — 12 mi
• Confederate Cemetery — 14 mi
• McCoy Brothers — 15 mi