This story was produced by the Tennessee Lookout and WPLN News, with support from the Pulitzer Center and the Education Writers Association.
Less than two months after Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, a Black law student in Nashville named Rita Geier set off a series of events that ultimately reshaped higher education in Tennessee and around the country.
Geier was attending Vanderbilt University in Nashville, clerking for white Civil Rights lawyer George Barrett and teaching a class across town at Tennessee State University, which was called Tennessee A&I at the time. The school is the state’s only historically Black public university.
Even though Brown v. Board of Education had been decided more than a decade ago, it was obvious to Geier that this public, mostly Black school was still being treated like a second-class institution.
“Tennessee State, at that time, was very dilapidated,” she said. “I, of course, was a law student and was learning all about civil rights and the legal remedies that were possible, and it didn’t take long for us to see there was a tool that could be used. And I was the perfect plaintiff.”
Together, Geier and Barrett crafted a legal complaint. They said that the state of Tennessee wasn’t giving TSU enough money — for its salaries, its library, its buildings — because it was a predominantly Black university.
“I mean, the motivation was to get more resources and equal facilities,” she said. “Maybe I was naive. But I really believed in the law.”
Almost every Southern state would go on to have its own version of the Geier case, battling over the desegregation of higher education. (The Mississippi case even went before the U.S. Supreme Court.)
But the Geier case in Tennessee was the longest-running lawsuit on this topic in the entire country. It lasted for 38 years, from 1968 to 2006. Ultimately, the name itself — Geier — became a shorthand for the state’s efforts to increase diversity at its public universities.
And along the way, it led to a series of dramatic and often contentious events that changed the trajectory of higher education in Tennessee, including the unprecedented merger of UT Nashville and Tennessee State University.
The general of the war
Today, Tennessee State University has two campuses: the main campus on Jefferson Street, and an auxiliary property downtown called the Avon Williams Campus.
But back in the late 1960s and 1970s, this property belonged to the University of Tennessee. UT Nashville had started as a night school, but was quickly expanding into a full-fledged university campus.
In Geier’s original complaint, she took aim at UT’s expansion, arguing that it was perpetuating a “dual system of higher education” in Nashville. How could a historically marginalized university, already struggling with poor state funding, compete with this growing campus within the same city?
The state defended the expansion by arguing that the two universities could coexist, especially if they offered different programs.
And the state’s position seemed to be gaining traction — until it hired a new president of TSU in 1974: a tall, burly man named Frederick Humphries.
Humphries was 39 years old, a chemistry professor by training, and he’d never been a college president before.
“They thought they were going to run him over,” said Humphries’ son, Laurence. “And it turned out to be quite the opposite.”
Almost immediately, Humphries started to chafe against the state’s position in the Geier case. He said in an interview with The Tennessean, right after he was hired, that the state’s plan to have two universities in Nashville wasn’t going to work, and that TSU should be the only public university in Nashville.
Humphries publicly challenged the chancellor on his support for TSU during his first meeting with the state Board of Regents. Humphries later told a colleague at TSU, George Pruitt, that two of the top officials from the board followed him into the bathroom after the meeting and threatened to fire him if he didn’t step in line.
“And I’ll never forget what Fred said,” Pruitt recalled. “He said, ‘Well, I got a problem. If I do what you ask me to do, I’m going to sell out the institution that I head. I’m going to sell out its history and tradition, and I’m going to sell out the interest of Black people in the state and all over the country. If I’m true to those things, you’re going to fire me.
“So given the choices, I’d rather take the consequences.”
TSU in the crosshairs
Humphries made the same argument when he testified in court in the fall of 1976, as part of the Geier case. Remarkably, the judge in that case agreed with him — and ordered the merger of UT Nashville into TSU. It was immediately appealed.
Meanwhile, the pressure on Humphries kept coming.
“They started investigating the hell out of us,” Pruitt said. “We had some deficits because they had been starving the institution’s resources for years, and we had some real challenges.”
Pruitt, who served as TSU’s vice president of student affairs, remembers a yearslong controversy involving its student enrollment computer system, which crashed in 1976. TSU had to calculate students’ cumulative GPAs by hand, and temporarily stopped flunking out students. It was then accused of padding its enrollment numbers.
In 1977, that issue was used as a reason to put Humphries on probation, although Pruitt said he believes the probation was actually the state’s retaliation for testifying in favor of the merger.
Then, in the winter of 1978, the heat went out on TSU’s campus while thousands of students were in the dorms.
“They tried to say that was because of the college’s incompetence, but the university documented it had been requesting for years funding to replace and service an outdated heating plant,” Pruitt said. “And the funds had been denied.”
Humphries, Pruitt and their teams were dealing with this while they were also running a university with thousands of students.
“When I say we were literally working 24 hours a day, seven days a week, it was true. I remember on Christmas, I opened up presents with my daughter and went to work on Christmas Day,” Pruitt said. “We knew we were at war. We knew that our jobs were at stake. We knew that if we lost, we were all gonna get fired. We even knew what the odds were — they were not with us. But we didn’t care.”
Laurence Humphries was in grade school at the time, but he also remembers the tension.
“There were nights where people would call and hang up. Someone threw a brick through my sister’s window. We used to have to have security outside sitting in the back of the house and in the front of the house. I mean this was full-on Mississippi Burning type stuff,” he said.
When his mother wrote a check that bounced, Laurence said, his father was furious.
“He told my mom, ‘This can’t happen to us. … We can’t make a mistake. They’re looking for a pretense to fire me,’” Laurence said. “‘I have to be above reproach, which means my family has to be above reproach.’”
‘Truth and justice and the American way’
In 1979, the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals came out with a ruling agreeing with the district judge: In order to achieve desegregation, it said, the state couldn’t have two universities with such divided racial demographics in the same city. So the state should keep TSU and fold this new university, UT Nashville, into it.
“That had never happened before in the history of this country,” Pruitt said. “In every other case, a court-ordered desegregation merger meant you shut down the Black school and send the Black kids to the white school. But this was the first time at any level where the Black institution survived.”
To this day, many people consider this to be the moment when TSU was saved from extinction. It would get a downtown campus, all of the UT Nashville faculty and students, and — most importantly — the resources and respect that came with being the premiere public university in the state capital.
“For one brief shining moment, the good guys won,” Pruitt said. “There was truth and justice and the American way.”
Laurence Humphries remembers the celebration, too. “My father thought he was going to be at Tennessee State the rest of his career,” he said.
But the celebration didn’t last very long, he said. “ He didn’t realize that five years later, the culture and environment of Nashville and the university was so toxic for him that he would have to leave.”
This is Part 1 of The Debt.
On Air - 90.3 WPLN-FM