Has the state of Tennessee really moved past its history of prejudice towards blacks?

According to the Tennessee Board of Regents, Tennessee public schools were desegregated in 1956, though many black students continued to suffer from the effects of the previous practice of legal segregation.

The U.S. District Court for Middle Tennessee ordered in 1968 that Tennessee should effectively dismantle its dual system of higher education at state universities. Then, on Jan. 5, 2001, the court approved the Geier Consent Decree: a state-wide, five-year, $41,505,000 initiative to help Tennessee’s higher education system correct past wrongs and provide equal opportunities across the board.

The Geier Consent Decree was discontinued last Sept. 11 when Gov. Phil Bredesen announced that the parties to the case felt that the state had met the lawsuit’s challenge.

During the five years since the 2001 decision, The University of Tennessee prospered under Geier-related state support.

Jonathan Reid, president of UT’s branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, said he feels the Geier Decree really helped boost African-American recruitment.

“There are African-American students who are really bright but just didn’t have the educational and financial resources to get here,” Reid said. “Essentially, Geier helped bring in better faculty members and a more diverse student body.”

As the state’s flagship public university, Reid believed that the Geier Consent Decree had a huge influence on UT.

“Other state schools might not see the same negative effects as UT,” Reid said.

Dennie Littlejohn, an executive committee member of UT’s Black Faculty and Staff Association, agreed. He felt that with Geier gone, attendance of black students at UT will decline, and no one seems to be aware of the issue.

“I don’t really see anyone doing anything about it, and it’s a damn shame, because it should not have ended,” Littlejohn said. “It will have a devastating effect on the black students’ presence at the university, because we do not have a level playing field coming out of our school systems in Tennessee.”

Eric Stokes, the assistant director of Enrollment Services in the Office of Undergraduate Admissions and head of minority student recruitment efforts, said trends in other states have backed Littlejohn’s statement.

“In Michigan, California, Texas and Georgia, black enrollment trends show that enrollment has dropped,” Stokes said. “Of course, this is a prediction, but it seems as though black enrollment at UT could also drop.”

Stokes also said that at UT, 95 percent of African-American freshmen held a scholarship funded by Geier.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson, writer for “New American Media,” noted that “in a 2004 survey, The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education found that blacks were still underrepresented at nearly all of the country’s top-ranked universities.”

The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education also found UT had the highest percentage-point increase between 2001 and 2004 in the number of black students on campus than at any other flagship state university in the country.

Dedrick Muhammad, Attieno Davis, Betsy Leondar-Wright and Meizhu Lui all found that “at the current pace, blacks and whites will not reach graduation parity until 2075, more than 200 years after the end of slavery.” They published this information in “The State of the Dream 2004: Enduring Disparities in Black and White.” They viewed affirmative action rollbacks as the cause of this continuing disparity.

With indications of potential decreases in black enrollment and continued under-representation at institutions of higher education nationwide, UT students may question the appropriateness of the dismissal of the Geier case.

Freshman Akina Morrow, double-majoring in journalism and electronic media and theater, said she would have not been able to attend school if it were not for Geier.

“Now that it has been removed, it leads me to believe that these scholarships weren’t offered to benefit African-Americans solely, but instead to help UT’s quota,” Morrow said. “I have a bit of a worry that UT’s current low enrollment of African-Americans will cease to increase or even drop lower.”

Brittany Lacy, a junior in legal studies, agrees.

“I can only speak on behalf of myself, but I don’t think that the university will be able to retain as many black students as it has already,” Lacy said. “Traditionally, the university has been seen as an institution that has not been as minority-friendly as many.”

To curb the negative affects of Geier’s discontinuation, UT has instituted the Tennessee Promise scholarship for low-performing target high schools and the Pledge scholarship for low-income students. However, Stokes said that these efforts, though good-intentioned, might not have a large enough effect on the black population at UT.

“The problem with the Pledge Scholarship is that it is geared towards low-income students and the majority of African-American students at UT are not considered low-income as the scholarship defines,” Stokes said.

The Promise scholarship program also worries him since many of the schools the scholarship targets might not produce the best students.

“That’s another problem — that these target schools aren’t necessarily going to be producing the top students. Therefore, students who are top students but do not go to these target schools will not qualify for the Promise,” Stokes said.

Reid said every student should at least learn more about this issue to help the university reach its full potential for diversity.

“The Geier concerns not only African-Americans but all students,” Reid said. “It provides opportunities for a more diverse student body and it would be a shame to lose that.”