From Tuskegee to Utica: The education movement that shaped Black Mississippi

By Jean Greene

JA Guest Writer

We are living in a moment when history – especially the history of people of color – is being challenged, reframed, and in some cases deliberately erased. In such times, revisiting the lives and ideas of foundational leaders is not nostalgia. It is necessary.

Booker T. Washington stands among the most influential figures of the early twentieth century. His impact reached far beyond Tuskegee Institute in Alabama and extended into Mississippi, where his philosophy directly shaped institutions that still stand today, including the Utica campus of Hinds Community College.

I first encountered that legacy more than two decades ago when I became Director of Library Services and Archives on the Utica campus. In the records, the photographs, and the stories passed down, one name surfaced again and again: William Henry Holtzclaw. And behind Holtzclaw stood his mentor – Booker T. Washington.

Washington believed African Americans must pursue education, own property and businesses, learn marketable trades, and build economic independence. He promoted self-help and vocational training as pathways toward stability and long-term advancement. These ideas gained support from many white philanthropists of the era but also placed him in philosophical opposition to other Black leaders, most notably W.E.B. Du Bois.

Washington and Du Bois represented two distinct approaches to racial progress. Washington, born into slavery in Virginia around 1856, rose to national prominence as an educator and founder of Tuskegee Institute. Du Bois, born free in Massachusetts in 1868 and educated at Fisk and Harvard, argued for direct protest and higher education for what he called the “Talented Tenth” of the African American population. Their disagreements shaped national debates about strategy, leadership, and the future of Black education.

Between 1890 and 1915, Washington emerged as the dominant national voice in African American public life. He established the National Negro Business League and built a network of schools and institutions modeled on Tuskegee – what critics, including Du Bois, called the “Tuskegee Machine.” Through this network, Washington influenced philanthropy, political patronage, and educational development across the South.

One of Washington’s most significant partnerships was with Julius Rosenwald, president of Sears, Roebuck and Company. After reading Up From Slavery in 1910, Rosenwald joined Washington in creating what became the Rosenwald School Building Program. Over the next two decades, the initiative helped construct more than 5,000 schools for Black children across the South.

Mississippi alone had more than 600 Rosenwald Schools – second only to North Carolina. In many communities, these were the only primary and secondary educational facilities available to Black students. The program is widely credited by scholars with helping to lay the foundation for a Black middle class in the region.

Washington’s influence in Mississippi also took shape through key lieutenants and protégés, including Charles Banks of Mound Bayou and William Henry Holtzclaw, founder of Utica Normal and Industrial Institute.

Banks, an educator and businessman, became one of the most powerful Black leaders in Mississippi by the early twentieth century. With Washington’s support, he helped build economic institutions, including the Bank of Mound Bayou, and secured philanthropic investments for schools and libraries. Washington described him in My Larger Education as “the most influential businessman in the United States.”

But it is through Holtzclaw that Washington’s vision most directly reached Utica.

Holtzclaw, a graduate of Tuskegee, followed Washington’s directive to carry education into the most rural and underserved communities of the South. Washington wrote in Up From Slavery that he wanted his students “to return to the plantation districts and show the people there how to put new energy and new ideas into farming as well as into the intellectual, and moral, and religious life of the people.”

Holtzclaw chose Mississippi, describing it in The Black Man’s Burden as “the darkest section of the South for a colored man.” At the turn of the twentieth century, Jim Crow laws shaped every aspect of daily life, and most Black residents lived in deep poverty, working land they did not own under the authority of white landowners.

He arrived in Utica in 1902 and began teaching in a small public school at St. Peter Baptist Church. His larger goal, however, was to establish an independent institution modeled after Tuskegee. With little funding and enormous resistance, he began the work that would become the Utica Normal and Industrial Institute – starting literally under a tree and in a rented log cabin that served as both home and classroom.

Washington later wrote in the introduction to The Black Man’s Burden that Holtzclaw embodied the spirit Tuskegee sought to instill in its students and was doing “useful and successful work for his race and the community in which he lives.” He described Holtzclaw’s work as not merely the story of a man or a school, but an important chapter in the history of Black education.

For decades, Utica Institute operated through private donations and the determination of its founder. After Holtzclaw’s death in 1943, funding declined. By 1946, the school came under county control, and over time it evolved into what is now the Utica campus of Hinds Community College. The bell tower remains the only surviving structure from the original 1910 institute and stands as a physical reminder of that legacy.

Washington’s broader influence extended through what became known as the “Little Tuskegees” – schools across the South founded by his students and followers, each carrying forward his emphasis on education, discipline, and economic independence. These institutions were built in places where formal education for Black people had been scarce or nonexistent.

Working in the archives, I am reminded daily that these institutions were not inevitable. They were built by people who traveled alone into hostile environments, raised money from strangers, taught students who had little more than determination, and believed education could transform entire communities.

Their work reshaped Mississippi. Their influence remains embedded in its schools, its towns, and its families.

Working in archives, I have learned that history does not disappear all at once. It fades when documents are discarded, when stories go untold, when buildings are renamed, repurposed, or quietly forgotten. It erodes when the people who carried the memory are gone and no one steps forward to hold it.

The legacy of Booker T. Washington, William H. Holtzclaw, and the institutions they built is not abstract. It lives in fragile paper records, in photographs curling at the edges, in aging structures that still stand, and in communities shaped by their presence. I have held these materials in my hands. I have listened to the stories of those who lived this history, not as legend, but as daily life.

That is why this history must be protected.

Not polished into something more comfortable. Not reduced to a footnote. Not rewritten to fit a narrative that forgets who built what, and why.

The work Washington began – and that Holtzclaw carried into Mississippi – was about more than schools. It was about survival, dignity, and the right of Black communities to define their own future through education and self-determination.

If we lose that truth, we lose more than history. We lose the evidence of how communities fought to exist, to learn, and to rise in a world that often worked against them.

And once that is gone, it is far harder to build it back.

Jean Greene is a Mississippi cultural historian, community archivist, and retired HBCU librarian whose work focuses on preserving the legacy of the Utica Institute and the broader history of Black rural education in the Deep South. She spent more than thirty years at Hinds Community College’s Utica Campus, where she expanded the William Holtzclaw Library & Archives, built the institution’s first comprehensive archival program, curated exhibitions, and mentored emerging library leaders across the HBCU community. She currently serves as Co-Director of the Utica Institute Museum, leading efforts in historical interpretation, community storytelling, and cultural preservation.