When former attorney and civil rights pioneer Rita Geier received an honorary doctorate degree last week from the University of Tennessee, it was an odd sort of full-circle moment: The award recognized, in part, her role in suing the university more than half a century ago.
“Her courageous legal efforts not only transformed Tennessee’s educational system, but also paved the way for a better society,” said Donde Plowman, the university’s chancellor. “She has left a lasting mark on our state and our country’s history.”
Geier was the lead plaintiff in a 1968 class action lawsuit against Tennessee’s governor and university systems, which alleged that the state was upholding an unconstitutional segregated system of public higher education.
At the time, she was both a law student at Nashville’s Vanderbilt University and a part-time history instructor at Tennessee State University, then called Tennessee A&I. The university had been founded to provide higher education for Black students at a time when they weren’t allowed into any other public universities.
Technically, by the late 1960s, the University of Tennessee and other previously all-white universities had eliminated race-based admissions requirements. But they were still almost entirely white, and Tennessee A&I was still entirely Black.