Rust College

Holly Springs, MS (Marshall County; north Mississippi) — Private HBCU, est. 1866; home of the Bearcats; one of the oldest HBCUs in Mississippi, founded just one year after the end of the Civil War by the Freedmen's Aid Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church; one of only four HBCUs in the country founded before 1867; Holly Springs was home to Ida B. Wells — one of the most courageous journalists and anti-lynching activists in American history — who attended and briefly taught at Rust College; strong mass communication, social work, and education programs; a deeply significant institution in the history of Black higher education in the Deep South