‍In the history of Black education and civic life in Jackson, Mississippi, the name Bettie C. Marino stands with quiet strength. She was remembered not only as one of the city’s first Black school teachers, but as a founder, organizer, and institutional builder whose work shaped generations of women and girls.

William Henry Lanier was among the most consequential African American educators in Mississippi during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Born enslaved in Alabama around 1851, Lanier rose to become a college president, long-serving supervisor of Black public schools in Jackson, and the namesake of the city’s first four-year Black high school. His career reflects both the possibilities and the tensions that shaped Black educational leadership in the post–Civil War South.