On May 18, 1964—the 10th anniversary of the Supreme Court's landmark Brown v Board of Education decision—Brown University in Providence, RI, and Tougaloo College, a historically black college in Jackson, MS, developed a "cooperative agreement." With the issues of Civil Rights confronting both institutions, they stepped into a relationship that despite early understandable conflict, has remained a unique collaborative venture that engages the culture, academia, and histories of these two distinctive institutions.