This five-story steel-framed Art Deco building with a U-shaped footprint replaced a smaller 1885 federal building on the same site. Faced with limestone, it rises from a rusticated first story through a three-floor section marked by fluted pilasters, to an attic story set off by a wide entablature. Low-relief geometric ornament and chamfered corners lend depth to the building’s hard edges. Aluminum lamp standards at the entrance hint at the opulent use of aluminum in the first-floor lobby, staircase, ventilation grilles, and elevator hall.
The fourth floor’s main courtroom includes a mural, Pursuits of Life in Mississippi (1938), funded by the Federal Art Project and painted by Ukrainian immigrant Simka Simkhovitch. In the 1960s, as civil rights cases began to be tried here, Chief Judge Elbert Tuttle believed the mural, which depicts African Americans as cotton pickers and banjo players, damaged the neutrality of the court and had it covered with a curtain. The most significant civil rights case decided here was James Meredith v. State of Mississippi in 1961, directing the University of Mississippi to integrate.