Vicksburg's All Saints' Episcopal College was established in 1907 as a finishing school for girls—white girls. The school was planned in the mid-1800s but the outbreak of the Civil War and subsequent Reconstruction delayed the doors opening until 1909. Church fathers selected a location high on a hill above the Mississippi River.
While it was called a college, the school offered prep school and college courses including the subjects of mathematics, Latin, Greek and ethics. In 1911, the school was accredited and a number of higher education institutes accepted the courses.
In 1961, while Freedom Riders were traveling through the South, the Episcopal Church maintained what was termed a “deafening silence” on civil rights. Objecting to this, a group of clergymen formed within the church, the Episcopal Society for Cultural and Racial Unity, and organized their own bus ride: a “Prayer Pilgrimage”, to visit segregated Episcopal schools and encourage acceptance of black students. They visited All Saints’ in Vicksburg with this goal but received a cool reception.
All Saints’ School was not integrated until 1967 when a tobacco heiress funded a $1 million program to desegregate “exclusive” Dixie prep schools. All Saints' started accepting boys a year later. The school finally closed in 2006, only to reopen in 2009 as a training campus for AmeriCorps, which is more diverse than the school founders could ever have imagined, with students of all races, religions and ethnicities.
great story -
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