Mode of Program Participation
Academic Scholarship
Participation Type
Paper
Presentation #1 Title
Double Discontinuity in East Tennessee: Black Enrollment at Maryville College, 1860s–1960s
Presentation #1 Abstract or Summary
Most of the scholarly attention to segregation, desegregation, and higher education in the South focuses on state-supported institutions. Largely absent from this discourse is how policy — state or federal — supplied the legal environment that determined what was possible, and what not, for private institutions to offer a non-segregated teaching and learning environment. Fairly widely known, nonetheless, is the story of how Berea College enrolled both black and white students across the last third of the 19th century, then had to stop when in 1904 the Kentucky legislature made it a crime to do so. Far less well known is the similar story from Maryville College, outside of Knoxville, Tennessee, which also operated on a quite nonracial basis into the 20th century but then had to stop when the Tennessee legislature, in 1901, made it a crime (Kentucky adopted this approach three years later). My paper sketches the late-19th century and the 1901 end to non-segregation at Maryville, then develops the return to non-segregation in 1954, immediately following Brown v. Board of Education. Maryville College’s leaders determined that the Supreme Court’s decision overruled the Tennessee statute and thus freed the College to return to its former ways. The major objectives of the paper I propose are (1) to bring the Maryville College history back into notice, (2) highlight how this one Appalachian college revived its former policy, and (3) recount the experiences of the College’s black pioneers of the 1950s. In The Adaptable South (1991), Lester C. Lamon published “Ignoring the Color Line: Maryville College, 1868–1901,” a chapter intended as part of a long-term project. After he found himself unable to complete that project, he gave to the College’s archives his collection of research materials (including interviews, among them some with the pioneers of the 1950s), and he is pleased that someone plans to use those items to explore the period of the College’s mid-20th-century return to its late-19th-century policy. Beyond that collection, the archives also contain other materials. The main published history of the College, By Faith Endowed (1994), offers a terse account of a subject the authors were clearly uncomfortable with. It is a story that cries out to be told.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #1
Peter Wallenstein, professor of history at Virginia Tech, is an award-winning teacher and writer. His many books and essays, in Southern history generally or Appalachian history in particular, include an edited collection of essays, Higher Education and the Civil Rights Movement: White Supremacy, Black Southerners, and College Campuses (2008).
Double Discontinuity in East Tennessee: Black Enrollment at Maryville College, 1860s–1960s
Most of the scholarly attention to segregation, desegregation, and higher education in the South focuses on state-supported institutions. Largely absent from this discourse is how policy — state or federal — supplied the legal environment that determined what was possible, and what not, for private institutions to offer a non-segregated teaching and learning environment. Fairly widely known, nonetheless, is the story of how Berea College enrolled both black and white students across the last third of the 19th century, then had to stop when in 1904 the Kentucky legislature made it a crime to do so. Far less well known is the similar story from Maryville College, outside of Knoxville, Tennessee, which also operated on a quite nonracial basis into the 20th century but then had to stop when the Tennessee legislature, in 1901, made it a crime (Kentucky adopted this approach three years later). My paper sketches the late-19th century and the 1901 end to non-segregation at Maryville, then develops the return to non-segregation in 1954, immediately following Brown v. Board of Education. Maryville College’s leaders determined that the Supreme Court’s decision overruled the Tennessee statute and thus freed the College to return to its former ways. The major objectives of the paper I propose are (1) to bring the Maryville College history back into notice, (2) highlight how this one Appalachian college revived its former policy, and (3) recount the experiences of the College’s black pioneers of the 1950s. In The Adaptable South (1991), Lester C. Lamon published “Ignoring the Color Line: Maryville College, 1868–1901,” a chapter intended as part of a long-term project. After he found himself unable to complete that project, he gave to the College’s archives his collection of research materials (including interviews, among them some with the pioneers of the 1950s), and he is pleased that someone plans to use those items to explore the period of the College’s mid-20th-century return to its late-19th-century policy. Beyond that collection, the archives also contain other materials. The main published history of the College, By Faith Endowed (1994), offers a terse account of a subject the authors were clearly uncomfortable with. It is a story that cries out to be told.
