Tougaloo began in 1869, when the American Missionary Association bought the Boddie Plantation, five hundred acres and its house, for $10,500 to educate people who had been enslaved. The state chartered it in 1871. Today the campus in Madison County, just north of Jackson, holds a historic district of ten buildings on the National Register, among them Woodworth Chapel, raised by students in 1901 and restored in 2002.
Its place in the civil rights movement is concrete. On March 27, 1961, nine Tougaloo students and NAACP Youth Council members walked into the whites-only Jackson library and sat down to read: Meredith Coleman Anding Jr., James Cleo Bradford, Alfred Lee Cook, Geraldine Edwards, Janice Jackson, Joseph Jackson Jr., Albert Earl Lassiter, Evelyn Pierce and Ethel Sawyer. Medgar Evers had trained them. They were arrested, convicted of breach of the peace and fined, and the protest led to the library's integration. Myrlie Evers later called it the change of tide in Mississippi. Woodworth Chapel hosted speeches by Martin Luther King Jr., Medgar Evers and Fannie Lou Hamer. Anne Moody wrote of her years there in Coming of Age in Mississippi, and Joan Trumpauer helped lead the Jackson Nonviolent Movement.
The college also holds a notable art collection, begun in 1963 by New York artists and critics, with works by Jacob Lawrence, Elizabeth Catlett and Hale Woodruff, and a civil rights archive with papers of Evers, Hamer and King. Myrlie Evers-Williams gave the Evers home to Tougaloo in 1993. This is a working campus, so contact the college about visiting the art and archives.
The closest stops worth working into your route