Leslie Frazier

Alcorn State University is a historically black university comprehensive land-grant institution in Lorman, Mississippi. It was founded in 1871 by the Reconstruction era legislature to provide higher education for freedmen. It was the first black land grant college in the United States. The... university is counted as a census-designated place and had a resident population of 1,017 at the 2010 census. Medgar Evers, a civil rights activist, graduated in 1948 from here. Students at the college were part of the mid-twentieth century civil rights struggle, working to register residents for voting and struggling to end segregation. Other alumni have been activists, politicians and professionals in Mississippi and other states. The University is a member-school of the Thurgood Marshall College Fund. Alcorn State University was founded on the site originally occupied by Oakland College, a school for whites established by the Presbyterian Church. Oakland College closed its doors at the beginning of the American Civil War so that its students could fight for the Confederate States of America.
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Columbus is a city in Lowndes County, Mississippi that lies above the Tombigbee River. It is approximately 146 miles northeast of Jackson, 92 miles north of Meridian, 63 miles south of Tupelo, 60 miles northwest of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and 120 miles west of Birmingham, Alabama. The population... was 25,944 at the 2000 census. It is the county seat of Lowndes County and the principal city of the Columbus Micropolitan Statistical Area, which is part of the larger Columbus-West Point Combined Statistical Area. Columbus is also part of the area of northeast Mississippi called The Golden Triangle, consisting of Columbus, West Point and Starkville, in the counties of Lowndes, Clay and Oktibbeha. The first record of the site of Columbus in Western history is found in the annals of the explorer Hernando de Soto, who is reputed to have crossed the nearby Tombigbee River on his search for El Dorado. However, the site does not enter the main continuity of American history until December 1810, when John Pitchlynn, the U.S.
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