McKinley High School — Bus Boycott Site

In 1916, four students crossed a stage and became the first African American high school graduates in Louisiana. McKinley was the first high school established for Black students in East Baton Rouge Parish. The original building opened in 1927, named for the 25th president. Twenty-six years later, on June 19, 1953, Reverend T.J. Jemison stood in McKinley's auditorium and launched the Baton Rouge Bus Boycott. Twenty thousand Black residents refused segregated buses for eight days. It was the first large-scale civil rights bus boycott in American history — two years before Montgomery. The meetings outgrew the auditorium and moved to the city's stadium. When Martin Luther King Jr. began organizing in Montgomery in 1955, he contacted Jemison for advice. The original 1926 building entered the National Register of Historic Places in 1981. The Alumni Association purchased it from the school board in 1992 and operates it now as an alumni center. In 2016, the Toni Morrison Society placed a Bench by the Road marker here — one of fewer than thirty worldwide, commemorating sites erased from collective memory. The bench and historical marker are accessible during school hours on East Boulevard, where a strategy session in a high school auditorium became a rehearsal for the movement that followed.