Mississippi College will change its name and drop its football program after the current season, the board of the private institution announced Monday.

The college, in the Jackson suburb of Clinton, will become Mississippi Christian University beginning with its bicentennial in 2026. It said in an announcement that the new name emphasizes the school’s status as a comprehensive university while keeping the MC logo and identity.

“These transformational and necessary changes are extremely important to the future of this institution,” Mississippi College President Blake Thompson said. “As we look ahead to the institution’s bicentennial in 2026, we want to ensure that MC will be a university recognized for academic excellence and commitment to the cause of Christ for another 200 years.”

Mississippi College sports teams compete in NCAA Division II. The college will have 17 sports after football is discontinued.

“As we consider the changing landscape of college football, the increasing influence of the NIL and transfer portal, as well as increasing costs to operate and travel, we felt it was necessary to focus our efforts on building first-class programs that can compete for championships,” MC Athletic Director Kenny Bizot said.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Voters will choose between Mississippi Supreme Court Justice Jim Kitchens and state Sen. Jenifer Branning in a runoff election on Nov. 26, the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. Mississippi Today’s Adam Ganucheau, Bobby Harrison, and Taylor Vance break down the race and discuss why the election is so important for the future of the court and policy in Mississippi.

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This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Nov. 18, 1946

Future U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall was nearly lynched in Columbia, Tennessee, just 30 miles from where the Ku Klux Klan was born. 

He and his fellow NAACP lawyers had come here to defend Black men accused of racial violence. In a trial, Marshall and other NAACP lawyers won acquittals for nearly two dozen Black men. 

After the verdicts were read, Marshall and his colleagues promptly left town. After crossing a river, they came upon a car in the middle of the road. Then they heard a siren. Three police cars emptied, and eight men surrounded the lawyers. An officer told Marshall he was being arrested for drunken driving, even though he hadn’t been drinking. Officers forced Marshall into the back seat of a car and told the other men to leave. 

“Marshall knew that nothing good ever happened when police cars drove black men down unpaved roads,” author Gilbert King wrote in “Devil in the Grove.” “He knew that the bodies of blacks — the victims of lynchings and random murders — had been discovered along these riverbanks for decades. And it was at the bottom of Duck River that, during the trial, the NAACP lawyers had been told their bodies would end up.” 

When the car stopped next to the river, Marshall could see a crowd of white men gathered under a tree. Then he spotted headlights behind them. It was a fellow NAACP lawyer, Zephaniah Alexander Looby, who had trailed them to make sure nothing happened. Reporter Harry Raymond concluded that a lynching had been planned, and “Thurgood Marshall was the intended victim.” Marshall never forgot the harrowing night and redoubled his efforts to bring justice in cases where Black defendants were falsely accused.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.