The State of Mississippi established Alcorn in 1871 on the 1830 campus of Oakland College, a Presbyterian institution. It is the nation’s oldest land grant college for African Americans, and it remained the state’s only such public college until 1940. The campus retains the Oakland College buildings, which line a crescent-shaped ridge, including Oakland Chapel, a National Historic Landmark.
Alcorn’s first president, U.S. Senator Hiram Revels, the first African American to sit in either house of Congress, lived in the two-story clapboard president’s house (now Alumni House). The Federal-style residence (c. 1830) has a one-story, single-bay portico, supported by paired wooden columns, and a double-leaf entrance with an elliptical fanlight and sidelights.
Oakland Chapel (1838–1853; pictured above) is an imposing temple-front Greek Revival building with first-story classrooms and a second-floor auditorium. Built of brick laid in Flemish bond, the chapel features a massive hexastyle Doric portico, a square clock tower, and an impressive cast-iron staircase relocated from the ruins of Windsor (ND79). Belles Lettres Hall, a classroom and recitation building, is contemporary with Oakland Chapel and also features a massive Doric portico, but its narrower three-bay facade and lower height render it less monumental. Completing the original Oakland campus are two 1850s dormitories, each a two-story five-bay brick building with a hipped roof and an inset double-tiered full-width gallery supported by two-story tapered brick columns.
Significant twentieth-century buildings include the tripartite, brick Rowan Administration Building (1929–1930). Designed by C. H. Lindsley and built by William J. McGee, it continues the classicism of the antebellum campus in a more delicate Colonial Revival. Among the post—World War II buildings are the colonnaded E. E. Simmons Gymnasium (1959, Dean and Pursell), with an arcaded concrete shell roof; the James L. Bolden Campus Union (1963, William R. Watkins III; 1972, Cook Douglass Farr), which combines staggered massing with unifying horizontal lines; and the Walter Washington Administration Building (1974, Cooke Douglass Farr), a six-story building with Brutalist influence in its heavy massing, vertically textured concrete walls, and multilevel plaza. A lifesize bronze statue of Alcorn graduate and civil rights martyr Medgar Evers, sculpted by Ed Dwight and unveiled in 2013, stands in the dormitory complex named in his honor.