This story was produced by the Tennessee Lookout and WPLN News, with support from the Pulitzer Center and the Education Writers Association.
In the early 1980s, Tennessee State University was at a turning point.
For decades, it had been treated like a second-class university. The state had created the school in the early 1900s as part of the architecture of segregation: The federal government was forcing Tennessee to provide public higher education for Black residents, but the state didn’t want them to attend the University of Tennessee. And even years after the end of the Jim Crow era, poor state funding was the norm.
”Everybody that worked at Tennessee State knew Tennessee State was underfunded,” said George Pruitt, a former TSU administrator who worked there in the 1970s. “We didn’t talk about it. We assumed it.”
But in the late 1970s, a judge ordered the University of Tennessee’s Nashville campus to merge into TSU. It was an unprecedented legal remedy for a historically Black university, and one that had the potential to transform this previously marginalized campus.
TSU would now be the premier public university in Nashville — and afforded the resources, and respect, that came with that status.
“My dad’s vision for Tennessee State was to make it 20,000 students, grow all the professional programs, all the PhD programs, get the best and brightest kids, Black or white, into that institution,” recalls Laurence Humphries. His father, Frederick Humphries, was president of TSU at the time. Humphries wanted to “build Tennessee State into the strongest institution in the state of Tennessee, regardless of makeup,” said Laurence.
It was also important to Humphries that the university continue to prioritize the Black community, as was its founding mission, Laurence said. He envisioned a campus where white students would see a Black president and mostly Black administration.
“ I think he felt like he was going to make this institution a model for how integration is supposed to work,” Laurence said. “I’m going to show you that a Black man can create … a post-Jim Crow, civil rights institution.”
But many people in the state disagreed.
An ultimatum over racial identity
Within a few years, many white students who came over from UT Nashville had dropped out. Not as many white students were signing up. There was a group of white professors who blamed President Humphries. They said that, because he cared so much about Black identity at TSU, it was leading to resegregation.
The judge in the Geier case, the lawsuit that had led to the TSU merger, expressed dismay. This was not the integrated institution that he’d hoped the merger would produce. And so, in 1984, Judge Thomas Wiseman proposed a settlement that he hoped would lead to “greater progress … toward eliminating the dual system of higher education in Tennessee.”
Within 10 years, he said, TSU should aim for an undergraduate population that was 50% white. The faculty should be 50% white. The administrators should be at least 50% white. These numbers were not quotas, he said, but rather an objective that “encourages effort toward an end.”
The settlement seemed to acknowledge that TSU still wasn’t being properly funded by the state — that the living conditions on campus weren’t good, and the academic programs weren’t competitive enough. It said the state needed to bring TSU’s facilities up to par with other public universities and invest in special programs.
But the point of such funding, as the judge saw it, was explicitly to recruit white students to come to TSU. In fact, he wrote, the university should shed its Black identity altogether, so as to not alienate prospective white students.
“No institution will be identified as a one-race institution or a predominantly one-race institution,” he wrote in the settlement. “The heart of the problem is a traditionally black TSU.”
This was not what Humphries envisioned for TSU. But the way his son Laurence describes it, this settlement was an ultimatum.
For years, Humphries had been trying to get the state to care about and invest in its only public HBCU. That was the whole point of fighting for the merger. And this seemed to be the only way that the state would actually follow through.
“The state had put him and the university in a vise grip,” Laurence said. “Knowing my father … it had to be painful, extremely painful. He’s like, ‘I have to get out of here because I’m now violating my integrity.’”
Humphries took a job as president of his alma mater, Florida A&M — another public HBCU. He served in that role for 16 years. He restarted the law school, started a successful scholarship program, and doubled enrollment on campus. At one point, he recruited more National Achievement Scholars than Harvard.
He was so beloved that when he died in 2021, he was called “one of the most transformative people in American higher education.”
But the state of Tennessee, and its public HBCU, took a different path.
A political firestorm
Instead, Tennessee focused on how to get more white students to sign up at TSU, and how to minimize Black culture on campus.
The only problem? The student body and the alumni were still mostly Black. And this very quickly came to a head.
In 1986, Ebony Magazine published its annual HBCU Campus Queens issue. Typically, the college student selected to be Miss Tennessee State University was included in that issue.
But that year, Miss TSU Regina Hampton discovered that she was missing from the feature. Administrators at TSU had decided, without telling her, that the university couldn’t participate because Ebony promoted Black colleges, and TSU couldn’t identify as Black under the terms of the settlement.
“That outraged everybody, all over the state of Tennessee,” Pruitt said. “People in Memphis and Chattanooga and Knoxville and Nashville were outraged. The alumni were outraged. And it created a political firestorm.”
So in that way, the settlement didn’t work. It also didn’t work in that every time TSU tried to get more money, it ran into political backlash.
Four years after the settlement, for example, the governor budgeted $22 million to improve TSU’s buildings because there was asbestos found in the dorms. A state official then accused Black lawmakers of striking “political deals” for the money.
Eventually, the racial objectives were scrapped, as part of a new settlement for the Geier case in the early 2000s.
To Pruitt, the 1984 settlement missed the point of TSU’s potential.
“ Being a historically Black college was our history, will always be our history, should always be our history. That history should be celebrated and preserved,” he said.
“If Black students could receive a fair and excellent education at an institution where the president was white, where the faculty was predominantly white, why could not white students get a fair and quality education at a university where the faculty was predominantly Black and the administration was predominantly Black? Tell me why that couldn’t happen.”
This is Part 2 of The Debt. Read Part 1 here.
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