Alcorn State University and Oakland Memorial Chapel

Alcorn University was created by the Mississippi legislature on May 13, 1871, during Reconstruction, to educate Black students, and it is described by the university as the oldest public historically Black land-grant institution in the United States. The National Park Service's landmark study says it was started partly because white political leaders feared that Black citizens would seek admission to the white state university. Hiram R. Revels, the first Black man to serve in the United States Senate, became its first president. In his memoirs he wrote that the legislature wanted to call it Revels University and that, at his request, it was named instead for Governor James L. Alcorn.

The campus was bought ready-made. It had been Oakland College, a Presbyterian school founded in 1828 by the Rev. Jeremiah Chamberlain, a unionist who was killed by an advocate of secession. The college closed during the Civil War and was sold to the state for $40,000. Oakland's three-story main building, now Oakland Memorial Chapel, went up in 1838, and the college's president recorded that skilled Black craftsmen built it. It is a Greek Revival temple front with a cast-iron stair and a cupola, and it is a National Historic Landmark.

Reconstruction did not last. After white Democrats took back the legislature, they cut Alcorn's appropriation by almost 90 percent, and in 1878 it became a college of agriculture and mechanics. It grew from 225 acres to more than 1,700. The chapel still stands among the later buildings.