A Touch of Greatness: A History of Tennessee State University (America’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities)

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The Tennessee General Assembly authorized Tennessee Agricultural and Industrial State Normal School for Negroes in 1909 and opened with 250 students and three buildings in 1912. Depending heavily on donations from local Negroes and grants from philanthropic and federal agencies, the varsity graduated its first class in 1924, built collegiate-level facilities between 1927 and 1934, and achieved university designation in 1951. Tennessee A&I felt the oppression of a Jim Crow (de jure racial segregation) society until lawsuits forced the state to respect the separate but equal US Supreme Court decision of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). These lawsuits caused Tennessee to grant out-of-state fellowships for Negroes to go into graduate programs closed to them on the all-White University of Tennessee. In 1941, state officials also promised to make Tennessee A&I State College for Negroes the an identical to University of Tennessee for White students. In 1942, they authorized a graduate school at Tennessee A&I under threat of more NAACP-inspired lawsuits. Some other building program started in 1950 and continued in the course of the 60s, but state bonds left the institution deeply in debt, and state officials backed off the 1941 promise after Brown v. Topeka, Kansas, Board of Education (1954) started to dismantle Jim Crow education. From 1959 to 1967, Tennessee A&I students turned into heavily involved within the civil rights movement. In 1968, a set of plaintiffs sued in federal court to force the state to desegregate public higher education and provide A&I equal resources. The federal court merged the UT-Nashville campus into Tennessee State University in 1979. TSU has outgrown its Jim Crow legacy, and thrives as a racially diversified, comprehensive urban land-grant research doctoral-level institution with just about 9,000 students.

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