Thirteen freedom riders who were expelled from Tennessee State University in 1961 for participating in the civil rights movement will not be offered honorary degrees by the Tennessee Board of Regents.
Several board members said the action would violate their policy of awarding only two honorary degrees per year, per campus, Chancellor Charles Manning said.
“Everyone involved should get a recognition but not necessarily an honorary doctorate,” he said. “(An honorary doctorate) has more of an academic character to it.”
John Seigenthaler, chairman emeritus of the Tennessean newspaper in Nashville, former Tennessee Chief Justice A.A. Birch Jr. and U.S. Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., requested that the board grant honorary awards to the former TSU students.
Rep. Lewis took exception with the current policy.
“Unfortunately more than two people were required to tear down the walls of legalized segregation,” Rep. Lewis said in a letter to Gov. Phil Bredesen and Dr. Manning. “It took nothing short of raw courage for the hundreds of participants in the movement to stand up to the governor, mounted police, tear gas, fire hoses, attack dogs, and yes, even their colleges and universities.”
After the board voted against the proposal to award honorary degrees to the freedom riders, members voted to approve a proposal requesting that TSU hold an event to honor the former students’ work in the civil rights movement.
Board member Judy Gooch, who made the proposal to the board meeting in Chattanooga on Friday, said there should be an exception to the rule and students should receive the honorary degrees as an apology.
Mr. Seigenthaler said other schools have given honorary degrees in these circumstances. Southern University in Baton Rouge, La., gave 16 honorary degree to former civil rights demonstrators in 2004, and North Carolina A&T State University in Greensboro, N.C., gave four honorary awards to expelled black students in 1991, he said.
“There is plenty of precedent for them to do what they did not do,” Mr. Seigenthaler said.
Mr. Manning said the board considered other schools’ actions, but came to a different decision.
“They operate with a different policy than we do,” he said.
Though the proposal requested honorary degrees for 13 student, a total of 14 students were expelled from TSU after the freedom rides, a mandate by then-Gov. Buford Ellington.
One student was left off the proposal because of a criminal record, and board members did not want to give awards to some and not others, Dr. Manning said.
Also, two of the 13 students had been placed on academic probation before being expelled, said Dr. Manning, although he added that their poor academic performance was because of the time and energy they invested in Nashville sit-ins and the freedom rides.
Howard W. Roddy, a member of the board who lives in Chattanooga, said the division among the board was not racial and that the failure of the proposal was a matter of respecting procedure.
Mr. Seigenthaler said he was surprised that black board members did not support the proposal.
“You know what it says, that the sacrifice that many black students have made has been forgotten in this generation by both black and white,” said Mr. Seigenthaler.
Joan Garrett has been a staff writer for the Times Free Press since August 2007. Before becoming a general assignment writer for the paper, she wrote about business, higher education and the court systems. She grew up the oldest of five sisters near Birmingham, Ala., and graduated with a master's and bachelor's degrees in journalism from the University of Alabama. Before landing her first full-time job as a reporter at the Times Free Press, she ...
