Mississippi State History is committed to giving back to the community. While our efforts are many, two bear noting.

We support the Eighth of May celebration in Columbus, which marks the anniversary of the arrival of the Union army and the freeing of enslaved African American men and women. Held in the city’s old Black cemetery, students from the Mississippi School for Math and Science do research about the lives of slaves and new freemen buried in those plots, dress up in period garb, and portray these almost forgotten individuals. These interpretive narratives serve as a means of remembrance of Mississippi’s slave owning past, while the students themselves point to a much more optimistic future.

We also support an inner city school for bright, economically disadvantaged, students in New York City. The Excellence Boys Charter School, the all-boys K-8 charter school in Brooklyn, New York takes as its mission to prepare students to enter, succeed in, and graduate from outstanding high schools and colleges. We regularly pepper them with MSU regalia—pennants, pencils, t-shirts and, of course, cowbells. We also write students, telling them what we do at the university and how our university educations had made a fundamental changes in our lives.