21-05-2025
Civil Rights plaintiff Rita Geier receives honorary doctorate from UT College of Law
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, Knoxville. (Photo: Emily Siner for the Tennessee Lookout)
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, chancellor of UT-Knoxville. '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.
Geier says the disparities were obvious in other ways, too: the dilapidated buildings, the low pay for professors.
'TSU was the stepchild of the state higher education system. There's no denying that,' Geier said.
She began clerking for a local white attorney, George Barrett, who was seen as a 'troublemaker' in Tennessee for his willingness to take on 'issues that made people uncomfortable,' Geier said. Together, Barrett and Geier crafted a legal theory that the state had an obligation to integrate its public universities.
'I was learning all about civil rights and the legal remedies that were possible. It didn't take long for us to see that there was a tool that could be used,' Geier said. 'And I was the perfect plaintiff.'
Similar lawsuits were already in the works over segregated K-12 education, but the state's obligation in desegregating higher education, where enrollment was voluntary, was largely untested legal ground.
In their original complaint, Geier and Barrett argued that Tennessee failed to provide appropriate funding to TSU because of its predominantly Black enrollment. It also argued that the state was 'seeking to perpetuate a policy of racial segregation' by expanding a UT extension in downtown Nashville.
In the late 1970s, the lawsuit led to the merger of UT-Nashville with TSU — one of the only examples in the nation's history of a historically Black university acquiring a predominantly white campus.
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But the state's obligation to desegregate public universities continued to be debated in the courts for the next several decades. The final consent decree, in 2001, involved improving TSU's facilities and increasing scholarship programs for Black students across the state.
When the Geier case officially ended in 2006 — capping off 38 years of litigation — a judge declared that 'any remaining vestiges of segregation have been removed from the Tennessee system of public higher education.'
But conversations over the state's treatment and funding of TSU are ongoing. In 2021, a state report estimated that Tennessee failed to pay TSU at least $544 million in federally required funding in the decades following the end of segregation.
Meanwhile, Geier went on to pursue a legal career in government: She became a regional director for the Legal Services Corporation, general counsel for the Appalachian Regional Commission and associate commissioner for the Social Security Administration. After her retirement, she took a position at UT-Knoxville as an associate to the chancellor and a senior fellow at the Howard Baker Center for Public Policy.
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