‘It was just us’: Seven students from one family tie histories of Franklin, Union academies
On Friday, the Columbus Municipal School District will hold a ceremony at Franklin Academy to celebrate the second of the city’s two landmark events in the history of public education.
At 4 p.m. former Franklin Academy students, school officials and local and state dignitaries will gather in front of the school on Third Avenue North for a program and monument unveiling to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the school, the first public school in Mississippi.
‘We just did what we had to do’: Former officers reflect on Columbus Police Department’s integration
Thomas Lee Sr. and Joe Johnson Jr. sat with their heads bent over a copy of a grainy, 50-year-old photograph of the first black police officers in the Columbus Police Department.
Decades after ‘Little Rock Nine,’ school segregation lingers
Among the most lasting and indelible images of the civil rights movement were the nine black teenagers who had to be escorted by federal troops past an angry white mob and through the doors of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, on Sept. 25, 1957.
Trailblazers of integration: African Americans in area remember trials, triumphs of tumultuous process
Before Henry Ashford started his senior year of high school in 1966, his father sat him down and asked him if he wanted to be one of the first black students to attend Starkville High School.
MUW honors university’s first black students 50 years later
In 1966, Columbus college freshman Diane Hardy enrolled at Mississippi State College for Women, along with her two friends Barbara Turner Bankhead and Laverne Greene Leech.
They were the first black students to ever do so.
MUW researchers honored for work on school’s 1966 integration
In the years following the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a new file was created in the admissions office at then-Mississippi State College for Women in Columbus.
Programs explore desegregation at The W
Two upcoming events at Mississippi University for Women will feature ongoing research in the university’s preparations to commemorate 50 years of racial integration next year.
Slimantics: A sobering response, then and now
Fifty years ago Friday, the President of the United States was shot and killed in Dallas and some of the schoolchildren in segregated schools throughout
Meredith distances himself from moment in history
James Meredith is a civil-rights icon who hates the term “civil rights.”
It’s as if civil rights were somehow set apart from — well, rights.
Prof: Context key to 50-year integration events
Is the University of Mississippi putting a glossy sheen on its commemoration of 50 years of integration?