Millsaps College is a small liberal arts college in the heart of Jackson, Mississippi. Many residents believe it to be the most rigorous and prestigious school in the state.
Although it has fewer than 1,000 students, Millsaps has produced a disproportionate number of distinguished alumni, including many Rhodes and Fulbright scholars, along with numerous politicians, authors, and entertainers.
Millsaps College notable alumni include Governor Tate Reeves, authors Kiese Laymon and Ellen Gilchrist, and even legendary talk show host Johnny Carson, who attended the V-12 Navy College Training Program there.
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Millsaps College Notable Alumni
As a liberal arts college, Millsaps is known for its top-notch programs in fields such as English, history, and political science. Its English department in particular has boasted some impressive faculty members over the years, including one of the greats of Southern literature, Eudora Welty.
Millsaps’s humanities departments not only offer a rigorous education and develop strong critical thinking skills, but they graduate many successful people in the fields of literature, politics, and pop culture.
The school’s alumni base boasts governors, Congresspeople, state Supreme Court justices, and dozens of highly regarded authors, poets, actors, and entertainers.
Although it was difficult to whittle down the list of Millsaps College notable alumni to ten or fewer prominent names, we did the best we could.
Here is a sampling of some of Millsaps College’s most distinguished alumni.
Tate Reeves
Tate Reeves has been the governor of Mississippi since 2020. A member of the Republican party, he has steadily ascended the state government ranks, moving from state treasurer to lieutenant governor and now governor.
Reeves is a 1996 graduate of Millsaps College, earning a bachelor’s degree in economics. He played college basketball at Millsaps for two years before a shoulder injury forced him out of the sport.
Before going into politics, Reeves put his economics degree to work as a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) working for banks that included AmSouth and Trustmark National Bank.
Kiese Laymon
Kiese Laymon is a writer and professor. He has published three best-sellers, including two memoirs and one novel, and teaches creative writing and English at Rice University.
Laymon didn’t actually graduate from Millsaps, but he went there before transferring to Oberlin College, where he earned his bachelor’s degree, followed by an MFA from Indiana University—Bloomington.
Laymon cites racism for his exit from Millsaps after being suspended from the school for taking a book from the library. He writes about the experience in his best-selling memoir How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America (link to Amazon).
Ellen Gilchrist
Ellen Gilchrist is a prolific writer with many novels, short stories, and poetry collections under her belt. Her 1984 short story collection Victory Over Japan (link to Amazon) won her a National Book Award.
Gilchrist attended and graduated from Millsaps in the late 1950s and studied under Eudora Welty in the English department while she was there. She later pursued an MFA in creative writing from the University of Arkansas but did not complete the degree.
In addition to her writing, Gilchrist is well-known for her commentaries on NPR, a collection of which she published in a book, Falling Through Space.
Donald Triplett
Donald Triplett was the first person ever diagnosed with autism. He was known as “Case 1” by Leo Kanner, the Austrian psychiatrist who diagnosed him.
Triplett was a savant, able to memorize complex musical pieces on the piano and perform complicated math problems instantly in his head. This condition is actually quite rare in people with autism, though thanks to movies such as Rain Man that portray autism in this manner, many people believe it to be much more common.
Triplett graduated from Millsaps College in 1958 with a degree in French. Afterward, he returned to his hometown and worked in a local bank for several decades.
Christopher Lee Nutter
Christopher Lee Nutter is an author who has published several best-selling memoirs detailing his experiences growing up as a closeted gay man in the deep South. Nutter lived in the Birmingham suburb of Vestavia Hills before attending Millsaps.
Nutter is perhaps most famous for being the first person to coin the term “metrosexual” to describe straight men who are assiduous about fashion and personal grooming. The TV show Queer Eye for the Straight Guy later launched the term into the common lexicon.
Nutter graduated from Millsaps in 1993. A year later, a piece he wrote for Details magazine about life in the proverbial closet allowed his writing career to take off.
Scott Tracy Griffin
Scott Tracy Griffin is an actor and writer who is best known as being the world’s foremost expert on Tarzan and his creator, Edgar Rice Burroughs. Griffin authored Tarzan: The Centennial Celebration, an illustrated history of the character.
Griffin also launched a Tarzan comic strip that has been featured in newspapers and magazines across the country. He regularly serves as a consultant for TV shows, books, and movies that feature the character.
Griffin attended Millsaps College in the 1980s and graduated with a degree in sociology, after which he immediately moved to Southern California to begin his acting and writing career.
Ray Marshall
Ray Marshall is an economist who served as the Secretary of Labor under President Jimmy Carter. He is currently in his 90s and still serving as professor emeritus in the economics department at the University of Texas at Austin.
Marshall has a true “started at the bottom” story. He was raised in an orphanage and entered the U.S. Navy at only 15 years old. He fought in World War II, after which he returned home, earned his bachelor’s degree in economics from Millsaps, and went on to earn a Ph.D. from the University of California—Berkeley.
Marshall also helped found the Economic Policy Institute.
Johnny Carson
Here’s Johnny! The legendary late night talk show host needs no introduction, but many people might not realize that he’s an alumnus of Millsaps College.
To be fair, Carson didn’t graduate from Millsaps, but he did attend the school’s V-12 Navy College Training Program before serving in World War II. This program was designed as an accelerated training program for young military men to become officers during the war. Enrollees were typically college-aged or just out of high school.
Following the war and his service in the Navy, Carson returned home and attended college not at Millsaps but at the University of Nebraska—Lincoln. After that, he got his break in show business, and the rest, they say, is history.
