This historically black college was founded in Natchez as the Natchez Seminary in 1877 by the American Baptist Home Mission Society. In 1882, the seminary moved to Jackson’s N. State Street and was renamed Jackson College; it relocated here opposite Campbell College in 1902. In 1940, after the withdrawal of American Baptist support, it transferred to the state as a teacher’s college. The college absorbed Campbell College in 1964 and became a university in 1974.
The campus was centered on a quadrangle that is now a shady grove. The only surviving original building, the rectangular, brick Ayer Hall (1904, W. S. Hull; pictured above), defines the quadrangle’s east side. Its fourth floor and roof burned in 1939 but were restored in 2003 by Robert Parker Adams. The Z. T. Hubert Center (1944, N. W. Overstreet and Associates; Dalton Street) indicates the residential scale of early campus expansion. From the 1950s, the campus grew west and north with many new buildings. Notable is the red brick, bow-fronted Rose Embly McCoy Auditorium (1952, R. W. Naef), originally a city-owned building. Incised relief figures above the entrance were a project of the Allied Arts Studio of Jackson with Karl Wolfe.
Alexander Hall (1961, Overstreet, Ware and Ware; 1967 annex, Frank E. Rice), a five-story men’s dormitory with blue spandrels, was the site in May 1970 of an anti-Vietnam War protest held in solidarity with four Kent State University students killed by Ohio national guardsmen. Jackson police and Mississippi state troopers shot into the crowd, killing a Jackson State student and a senior from the nearby Jim Hill High School.