Alcorn State University

Overview

Alcorn State University is a public historically Black land-grant research university near Lorman, Mississippi, founded in 1871 as the first Black land-grant college in the United States and named for former Mississippi governor James L. Alcorn. It was established by Mississippi’s Reconstruction-era, Republican-led legislature on the former site of Oakland College, which had gone defunct during the Civil War. U.S. Senator Hiram R. Revels resigned his Senate seat to become Alcorn’s first president. The state legislature provided $50,000 a year for ten years toward the college’s establishment and operations, along with three-fifths of the proceeds from the sale of 30,000 acres of federal land scrip — $113,400 of the $188,928 raised — earmarked to support its agricultural and mechanical programs.

Setbacks After Reconstruction

After white Democrats known as Redeemers took control of the Mississippi legislature, Alcorn’s state appropriation was slashed by nearly 90 percent, to $5,500 a year, and an all-white board of trustees was appointed. The school was renamed Alcorn Agricultural and Mechanical College in 1878, and for decades its curriculum emphasized vocational and agricultural training over an academic one — a goal set for it by the post-Reconstruction legislature. Alcorn admitted only men at first; women were admitted beginning in 1895. The school took its present name, Alcorn State University, in 1974.