Founded in 1869 on the former John Boddie plantation, the historically black coeducational Tougaloo College began as a normal and agricultural school of the American Missionary Association, a northern abolitionist group. Although students learned vocational skills and assisted in the construction of several buildings and the ironwork entrance gate (c. 1910), Tougaloo became better known for educating Mississippi’s African American professional class, including doctors, lawyers, dentists, and teachers.
Tougaloo has an informal campus plan that follows a high ridge running roughly north-south. The school first occupied Boddie’s late-1850s house (known as the Mansion), a two-story frame Italianate villa with a central belvedere, designed and built by Jacob Larmour with woodwork from Hinkle, Guild and Company. Ballard Hall, built in 1886 to add classroom space, maintained the Italianate theme on the early campus. Holmes Hall (1926) and Galloway Hall (1930), both by E. J. Hull, help define a large shaded green overlooked by the Mansion.
Facing the Mansion across the green, Woodworth Chapel (1901, Josselyn and Taylor), with its distinctive, tapered white-shingled bell and clock tower, was built mostly with student labor in a composition combining Shingle Style with ideas from the Arts and Crafts movement. The stained beadboard interior, with its exposed roof trusses and seating for a thousand, became a hub of activity after Tougaloo’s students instigated the Jackson Movement (1961–1963) with their read-in at the Municipal Library (JM15) and lunch counter sit-ins at the downtown Woolworth’s. Among the prominent civil rights leaders who spoke here were Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King Jr., and Fannie Lou Hamer. In the late 1990s, after the capricious underlying Yazoo clay shifted the building’s foundation, the chapel was renovated by WFT Architects of Jackson and reopened in 2003.
Tougaloo’s historic buildings would have been lost if the ambitious campus plan developed in the early 1970s by Gunnar Birkerts and Associates of Detroit had been fully implemented. Only three buildings—all completed in 1973—came to fruition before budgetary realities intervened. The L. Zenobia Coleman Library, planned as the centerpiece of the new campus, was intended to connect to the dormitories and other buildings by second-level walkways. Composed of a series of thirty-foot concrete modules stepping down into the hollow, the massive Brutalist library conveys drama and movement in its intersecting lines and play of solids and voids. Inside, a grand concrete staircase leads down into the reading room. The long, narrow Renner and Branch dormitories have become landmarks themselves: raised on concrete columns to allow passage underneath, the concrete structures are organized as “houses,” with suites of rooms opening onto central lounges. Nearby, the Bennie G. Thompson Academic and Civil Rights Research Center, a two-story brick and glass modern-classical structure, was completed in 2011 to the designs of Duvall Decker.
Tougaloo College is in Madison County just across the Hinds County line from Tougaloo; the college is also within Jackson’s city limits.