Mississippi Industrial College

Holly Springs was home to several colleges for African Americans—Shaw University, which became Rust College, associated with the Methodist Episcopal Church, the public Mississippi State Normal College, which closed because of state government opposition in 1904, and Mississippi Industrial College (MIC). MIC was an enterprise of the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church (CME), and the particular project of Elias Cottrell, a CME Bishop. Cottrell began working to start a school, from first grade through college, in northern Mississippi in the early 1890s, and he set up a board of trustees and started raising money in 1900. Cottrell briefly named the future institution Mississippi Theological and Normal Seminary, but when it opened in 1906, it was called Mississippi Industrial College. By 1908 the school had 450 students, the majority of whom were in grades 1 to 8.

One of the intriguing features of Mississippi Industrial College, as historian Alicia K. Jackson has noted, is that it did very little industrial training. In the atmosphere of opposition to African American education of the early 1900s, Cottrell and other school leaders apparently made the decision to promote the respectability and uncontroversial nature of industrial education even though the school emphasized teacher training and liberal arts education. Students who aspired to the BA degree took multiple years of Latin and Greek, and literary study emphasized the classics of England and New England. The “industrial” feature of Mississippi Industrial College lay primarily in requiring students to sew, cook, and farm as part of their contribution to campus life.

Starting a private school for African Americans in the early 20th-century South was a challenge. Public money was unavailable; the CME Church, with its headquarters in Jackson, Tenn., did not have a wealthy group of supporters from throughout the country; and not many African Americans in Mississippi were making much money. Cottrell and future leaders relied on a combination of requests to the CME boards in Mississippi, occasional requests to a philanthropist like Andrew Carnegie, and the financial decisions of African American parents. Cottrell repeatedly mentioned the sacrifices of “struggling farmers . . . uneducated themselves, [who] have sacrificed much to promote facilities for their children.”

Mississippi Industrial College sat—and indeed, some of its former buildings still sit—across the street from Rust College, and the proximity of the two Methodist-affiliated institutions encouraged students and faculty to make comparisons in the size of the two schools and in the nature of their leadership. It was important to the identity of MIC that black educators and trustees were in charge, while they noted that Rust College had some white supporters and trustees. In the 1910s almost all MIC faculty members, led by Pres. D. C. Potts, educated at Howard University, came from historically black institutions—Fisk, Walden, Philander Smith, Lane, Mary Holmes, Payne, and Tuskegee, along with one faculty member from Berea College in Kentucky.

The nature of MIC as a church-related school dedicated to moral propriety and uplift was clear. All students wore uniforms, went to daily devotionals and a Wednesday prayer service, and many campus organizations, like the YWCA, YMCA, and the Epworth League, had religious elements. Later in the history of the institution, CME Bishop Oree Broomfield, a graduate of MIC, supported the efforts of young people to enroll in the college by allowing some of them to live free in his home and by offering scholarships to some students studying to become ministers.

In 1923 Mississippi Industrial College opened Carnegie Auditorium, a large and impressive auditorium whose size—seating for 2,000 people—reflected the ambitious goals of the college. For much of its history, MIC emphasized the training of teachers and candidates for the ministry.

In the 1960s MIC was, compared to many African American college campuses, relatively uninvolved in the civil rights movement. College president Edgar Everett Rankin discouraged student activism, but a number of students joined students at Rust College to protest segregation in Holly Springs businesses and to attend protest meetings.

After years of financial difficulties, Mississippi Industrial College closed in 1982. Some of its buildings, now owned by Rust College, house social service and educational organizations while some are in need of repair. MIC alumni organizations continue to meet.