The Status of Desegregated Higher Education in Tennessee

Abstract

For our purposes, the focal point of desegregation in institutions of higher learning in Tennessee was the opening of the University of Tennessee graduate school in January, 1952 to qualified Negro applicants. To be sure, some minor breaks had previously appeared in the general pattern of segregated higher education within the state, but this was, in effect, the major breakthrough at the level of state law and policy which set the stage for the change which later followed in both public and private institutions. We may define the purpose of this paper, therefore, as an assessment of the status of desegregation in higher education after a period of six years of change. If desegregation may be conceived of as the process of eliminating the legal, policy and administrative barriers which have given sanction and support to racial and group segregation, then it is necessary to mention, as part of our departure, something of the nature of these barriers which existed at the predesegregation stage. The admission of Negro graduate students at the University of Tennessee in 1952 was the first occasion that a public college or university of the state officially opened its doors to Negro students. This action came as a result of a court case in which Negro litigants sought to avail themselves of the right to state-supported graduate education at the University of Tennessee under the separate but equal doctrine of the Gaines, Sipuel, McLaurin and Sweatt decisions of the United States Supreme Court. Since 1901, the laws of the state had made segregation in all forms of education mandatory, making it unlawful for any school, academy or college to allow Negroes and whites in the same institution, or for any teacher to instruct Negro and white students in the same class or building.' The legal barrier was definite and substantial and it applied not only to public institutions of education at every level but to private ones as well. Thus, when Gene M. Gray, Lincoln Blakeney, Joseph Patterson and Jack Alexander sued to enter the University of Tennessee, with the support of the N.A.A.C.P., they made a direct attack upon the state segregation laws and the series of policies which had evolved therefrom in both public and private institutions. Gene Gray subsequently became the first Negro student to be admitted to the University, and in 1956 R. B. J. Campbelle, Jr. was the first Negro to graduate from the law school. By the middle of 1952, the developments at the University of Tennessee