Court Supervision Ends in Landmark Desegregation Case
by John Weaver, Editor at Large
Earlier this month, Tennessee settled Geier v. Tennessee - a case originally filed in 1968 - effectively completing its obligations in desegregating the state's public higher education system. In 1966, Rita Sanders took a teaching job at Tennessee Agricultural & Industrial State University (later renamed Tennessee State University), a traditionally black college in Nashville. She was appalled at the inadequate financing and facilities and sued two years later, claiming that the state maintained a separate and inferior collegiate system for African-Americans.
The case resulted in some unique solutions - including the 1977 court order to merge the Nashville campus of the University of Tennessee into Tennessee State - that culminated in an agreement six years ago. Sanders (now Rita Sanders Geier) and the other plaintiffs agreed to drop the charges in exchange for Tennessee meeting certain conditions. Those included appropriating $15.5 million for the Tennessee State endowment, $19.8 million in capital outlays and almost $15 million in financial aid. As of this month, those conditions have been met. Since the agreement, the state has spent $77 million to increase the equality and diversity at state colleges and universities. The settlement also eliminates racial enrollment goals, shifting the focus to making state colleges more attractive to people of all ethnic backgrounds.
Currently, the fans outnumber the critics of the agreement. Dr. Richard Rhoda, executive director of the Tennessee Higher Education Commission, said that although the case was originally "a Nashville lawsuit, it went statewide. All public institutions across the state have been held responsible and have become more diverse."
Shirley Raines, president of the University of Memphis, agrees: "Certainly there's been an impact throughout the state... there's been an increase in scholarships and special mentorships and so forth across the state." As proof, she cites the fact that 39% of the undergraduates at Memphis are African-Americans and that the school graduates more African-American PhDs than almost anywhere else in the country.
Now, however, with the courts no longer supervising desegregation in Tennessee's higher education system, it is an open question what the future will bring.
Justin Wilson, who served as a deputy for policy to conservative former Tennessee Governor Don Sundquist, suggests that ending court supervision should be a goal in and of itself. He writes that before the agreement was negotiated by the Sundquist administration five years ago the "court, not educators, were deciding what was good for Tennessee students." Courts, says Wilson, should not be too enraptured with the "legal remedies of the 1960s."
Not everyone shares Wilson's views of the value of ending court supervision of desegregation, however. John C. Brittain, chief counsel of the lawyer's Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, worries that this agreement will not establish genuine higher education equality, particularly given what the loss of court supervision will mean for the future. Without such supervision, Brittain fears that progress will not be "sustained long enough to really build up [once segregated] institutions to competitiveness and comparability."
A report by the Harvard Civil Rights Project echoes Brittain's concerns. The Supreme Court, in the 1991 decision Board of Oklahoma v. Dowell, curtailed the ability of courts to maintain supervision of previously segregated school districts. As the Harvard report notes, the number of Southern black students attending majority white schools has declined every year since Dowell, and is now at its lowest point since 1970.
Whether the end result is good or bad, though Tennessee's model of merging schools and negotiating an agreement could become a model for other states. Nineteen states have legally segregated systems of higher educations, and only four of them - Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana and Tennessee - went to trial. Alabama is the only state where litigation is still pending, according to Steve Suitts, program coordinator at the Southern Education Foundation in Atlanta. Suitts feels the Tennessee litigation could have accomplished more, "but I think the fact of the matter is that these lines of cases have done about as much as they can at this point."