Spreading out on a tree-shaded lawn, this modernist school, originally for African American students, contrasts sharply with McComb’s earlier black high school, Burglundtown School (c. 1940; 411 St. Augustine), a brick T-plan building on a small, minimally landscaped site. Jones and Haas designed some of Mississippi’s most innovative post-World War II schools, using, as here, the cluster plan where age groups and functions were accommodated in different wings. In this one-story, steel-framed building, long window walls are shaded by deep overhangs to achieve a feeling of lightness, horizontal lines, and volume.
Ironically, this school built under Mississippi’s Equalization program—designed to prolong segregation—became the bastion of the McComb Movement in October 1961, when over one hundred students walked out of the school and marched to city hall (see SC17) in support of two students expelled for participating in a Greyhound Bus station sit-in. This unprecedented protest began three years of confrontations leading up to Freedom Summer of 1964.