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The Debt: Almost 60 years ago, a court case at TSU transformed Tennessee higher education

Retired attorney Rita Geier, center, accepts an honorary doctorate from Lonnie Brown Jr., left, dean of the Frank Winston College of Law at the University of Tennessee, and Donde Plowman, chancellor of the University of Tennessee. Geier and Civil Rights lawyer George Barrett in 1968 accused the state in a legal complaint of denying funding to Tennessee State University because it was predominantly Black. (Emily Siner for the Tennessee Lookout)
Retired attorney Rita Geier, center, accepts an honorary doctorate from Lonnie Brown Jr., left, dean of the Frank Winston College of Law at the University of Tennessee, and Donde Plowman, chancellor of the University of Tennessee. Geier and Civil Rights lawyer George Barrett in 1968 accused the state in a legal complaint of denying funding to Tennessee State University because it was predominantly Black. (Emily Siner for the Tennessee Lookout) Retired attorney Rita Geier, center, accepts an honorary doctorate from Lonnie Brown Jr., left, dean of the Frank Winston College of Law at the University of Tennessee, and Donde Plowman, chancellor of the University of Tennessee. Geier and Civil Rights lawyer George Barrett in 1968 accused the state in a legal complaint of denying funding to Tennessee State University because it was predominantly Black. (Emily Siner for the Tennessee Lookout)

By Emily Siner, Tennessee Lookout/WPLN News 8 min read

This story was produced by 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.”