Jackson, Miss. — Hayat Mohamed, a Tougaloo College senior, and Laurel Oldershaw, a 2014 graduate of Brown University, recalled their experiences on each other’s campus — an African-American with roots in the Sudan, who spent a semester at the Rhode Island institution, and an Ivy Leaguer from a Jewish background who attended the Mississippi HBCU last fall.
Their conversation, joined by several current and former students from both schools, was part of Freedom 50, a conference on the Tougaloo campus commemorating the 50th anniversary of the bloody 1964 Freedom Summer in Mississippi. It also marked the 50th anniversary of the Brown-Tougaloo Partnership, which was sparked by the involvement of students and faculty at both schools in the civil rights struggle in the South.
The partnership of the two schools also symbolizes the coalition of Blacks and Whites who joined forces to protest discrimination through sit-ins and marches. Much of their organizing took place on Tougaloo’s campus, as President Beverly Hogan explained in the opening plenary session Wednesday.
“It is very fitting that Tougaloo College is host site for this 50th commemoration of the Mississippi Freedom Summer,” Hogan said. “In the 1960s, during the turbulent years, it was here at Tougaloo College where the men and women of the movement came for refuge and safety and security,” Hogan said, adding that Tougaloo’s role in the freedom movement informs its mission today.
“It’s part of the Tougaloo College DNA that social justice tops our list in the preparation of young people who will go into the world and effect change in the global society,” she said.
Among the hundreds of people attending the conference are many of those same activists and organizers from the 1960s along with busloads of high school and college students from around the country who are participating in a concurrent social justice youth congress.
Currently, in addition to semester and spring break exchange programs, Tougaloo and Brown co-sponsor academic conferences and research projects involving their respective archives.
