A Brief Light in Holly Springs: Shaw University and the Earliest Legal Education for Black Mississippians

Gail S. Stephenson

Article by Gail S. Stephenson Featured Author

Posted August 2026

In northern Mississippi, midway between Oxford and Memphis, lies the little town of Holly Springs. Today the town has fewer than 7,000 residents, but in the mid-1800s, Holly Springs was a bustling town with 40 lawyers.1

In 1878, Holly Springs gained the distinction of being one of only two places in the South where Black citizens could obtain a legal education when Shaw University (renamed Rust University in 1882)2 established a legal department.3 The nascent law school survived a yellow fever epidemic in 1878 that killed 4,100 Mississippians,4 but after two years the program ceased to exist. The likely reason for its demise was Mississippi's system that did not require formal legal training for admission to the state bar.5

The only other source of legal education for Blacks in the South was Straight University in New Orleans, but Straight taught civil law, which was useful only in Louisiana.6 Thus, southern Blacks who wanted an education in the common law were limited to Shaw.

Shaw University was founded in Holly Springs by the Freedman's Aid Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1866, one year after the Civil War ended. The school was officially chartered as Shaw University in 1870. It was named after Reverend S.O. Shaw, who donated $10,000 to the school.7

The school originally offered elementary subjects to both children and adults in Asbury United Methodist Church. In 1867 school supporters erected the first school building. It gradually added high school and college-level courses. The elementary school continued until 1930; the high school lasted until 1953.8

1878 was a momentous year for the school and for Holly Springs. The first two students from Shaw's college department graduated that year.9 Shaw then expanded its offerings to include a law department. Although most law schools at the time had only two-year programs, and the Whites-only University of Mississippi offered a law degree in one year,10 Shaw offered an LL.B. program modeled after Harvard University, which required three years of study for a law degree.11 Shaw reported to the Commissioner of Education in 1878 that the department had one instructor, and six students were enrolled.12

But in July 1878, a yellow fever epidemic struck Mississippi. The epidemic raged through November 1878.13 The Commission reported that “prevalence of the yellow fever in the Mississippi Valley and its continuance into the autumn prevented the opening of schools at the usual time and affected not only the larger cities but many of the small interior towns.”14

The epidemic hit Holly Springs especially hard. Kinloch Falconer, the Mississippi Secretary of State, was a lawyer from Holly Springs. He left the state capital and went home to care for his brother and law partner Howard Falconer, and his father, Thomas Falconer, who were stricken with the fever. On September 17, 1878, he wrote the following, which was published in The Clarion, the Jackson newspaper:

Since my arrival here, two weeks ago tomorrow, one hundred of the citizens of Holly Springs have died … There are at least one hundred and fifty now sick … The fever has done its worst here … [N]urses and physicians are the only persons seen upon our streets.15

Falconer was able to bury his kinsmen before he too was overcome by the fever. He died on September 23 at the age of 39.16

Somehow Shaw continued its classes during the epidemic. The last report of the law department at Shaw was in 1880. Shaw reported to the Commissioner that it “gives the same advantages to women as to men,” and it still had a three-year law program with six students.17 However, it also reported that the law department was “[n]ot fully organized.”18

Irvin C. Mollison, the first Black appointed to the federal bench in the United States, opined that Shaw's law department closed because in the 1870s it was easy for a Black man in Mississippi to become a member of the bar without a law degree.19 He explained that from 1840 to 1880, Mississippi had a decentralized system of bar admission. A “local judge in open court examined the candidate for admission on matters as to his technical training in the law, his educational qualifications, and moral character.” If the candidate satisfied the judge, the judge could admit him to all courts in the state. During Reconstruction, the Provisional Military Governor appointed a judge in each district who was “friendly to the Negro or at least…not so hostile to him that they would not admit him to the bar.” The judge then appointed “three friendly lawyers” to examine the applicant.20

Because of the dearth of opportunity for formal legal training in the South, Blacks who wanted to obtain a legal education studied law under White lawyers. Mollison's father, Willis Mollison, a pioneering Black lawyer in Mississippi, reported that these White lawyers were “very generous,” enabling Blacks “to get their training under some of the most able and talented lawyers in the State.” They allowed Blacks to study in their offices and use their libraries. This all changed, around the turn of the 20th century, especially after a White Supremist governor, James Vardaman, came to power in 1904.21

When Shaw reported again to the Commissioner in 1882, the law program was gone. In the Professional Education section of the report, Shaw reported only a theological department. The only legal education department for the State of Mississippi was at the University of Mississippi, which had returned to a two-year legal program.22

The closing of Shaw's law department in 1880 marked not just the end of a program, but the disappearance of Black legal education in Mississippi for more than 80 years. Blacks were not offered the opportunity to study law in Mississippi again until Cleve McDowell walked into the University of Mississippi Law School in 1963.23

  1. David M. Callejo-Pérez, Holly Springs: Introduction to a North Mississippi City, in Counterpoints, Southern Hospitality: Identity, Schools, and the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi, 1964-1972, 20-21 (2001).
  2. Shaw renamed itself to avoid confusion with another school named Shaw University in North Carolina. The new name was chosen to honor the secretary of the Freedman's Aid Society, Richard S. Rust of Cincinnati, Ohio. Jay S. Stowell, Methodist Adventures in Negro Education 123-25 (1922).
  3. The U.S. Commissioner of Education issued annual reports on the status of education. Under the heading “Statistics of institutions for the instruction of the colored race for 1878, Schools of Law” the Commissioner lists Shaw, Straight, and Howard University. Commissioner of Education Report for 1878, XXXI (1880) [hereinafter Commissioner 1878]. Howard established a law department in 1869, but not everyone considers Washington, D.C., part of the South.
  4. Deanne Stephens Nuwer, Plague Among the Magnolias: The 1878 Yellow Fever Epidemic in Mississippi ix, 126, (2015).
  5. Irvin C. Mollison, Negro Lawyers in Mississippi, 15 J. Negro Hist. 38, 49 (1930).
  6. Commissioner 1878, supra note 3, at XXXI.
  7. Rust College, Our History, https://rustcollege.edu/history/ (last visited Nov. 7, 2025).
  8. Id.
  9. Id.
  10. The University of Mississippi reported to the Commission in 1880 that in 1842 it had reduced its law program to one year. Commissioner of Education Report for 1880, 182 (1882) [hereinafter Commissioner 1880].
  11. See A.Z. Reed, Training for the Public Profession of the Law 177 (1921); Commissioner 1878, supra note 2, at 57.
  12. Commissioner 1878, supra note 2, at XXXI.
  13. Nuwer, supra note 4, at ix, 126.
  14. Commissioner 1878, supra note 2, at XXXV.
  15. Letter from Gen. Falconer, Clarion (Jackson, Miss.) Sept. 18, 1878.
  16. Nuwer, supra note 12, at 59.
  17. Commissioner 1880, supra note 9, at 182.
  18. Id. at 705.
  19. Mollison, 15 J. Negro Hist. at 49.
  20. Id. at 43-44.
  21. Id. at 49-51.
  22. Commissioner of Education Report for 1882-‘83, 143 (1884).
  23. See Gail S. Stephenson, The Unsung Heroes of the Desegregation of American Law Schools, 51 J.L. & Educ. 118, 181 (2022).