Maryville College: An Early Leader in the Struggle for Biracial Education in Tennessee, 1819-1901
Public Historian
Contemporary Tennesseans usually associate the racial integration of schools in the Volunteer State with the ongoing civil rights movement as it is remembered in the 1950s and 1960s. Yet what was most likely the first instance of school integration in Tennessee took place at Maryville College fully one hundred and thirty five years before the United States' Supreme Court reversed the "separate but equal" doctrine in the Brown vs. Board decision in 1954.
Maryville College, established in 1819 as the Western Theological Seminary in Maryville, Blount County, was sponsored by the Presbyterian Church, long noted for its interest in promoting education on the frontier with the erection of "log cabin colleges." The original instructional building at the college, which might have been log, was a rented building known as the "little brown house" and was replaced later by more substantial brick edifices before and after the Civil War. A Tennessee Historical Commission historical marker indicates its changes in location from 1819 to 1871.
According to one historian, the first black student at Maryville College was an ex-slave, one George Erskine, who attended as a result of the actions of the Manumission Society of Tennessee. The society bought Erskine and then freed him to pursue studies at the Seminary in 1819. This was fourteen years before Oberlin College in Ohio was founded on a biracial basis. Erskine, who preached to mixed audiences in the South in the 1820s, was officially ordained by the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in 1829, and ironically became perhaps the first African-American Tennessean missionary to minister Liberia on Africa's western coast.
There seems to have been very little, if any, objection to a freed slave attending school with white schoolmates surrounded by the verdure hills of Blount County. However, white acquiescence to the notion that Negroes could be allowed to learn to read and write soured after the widespread fear of slave rebellions which spread throughout the South soon after Nat Turner's revolt in Virginia in 1831. Slaveowners throughout the South widely, though incorrectly, believed that the literate Turner carried out his bloody revolt as a result of having read "inflammatory" literature propagated by radical northern abolitionist societies. It was reasoned that if other blacks, free or slave, could read, they would sooner or later study abolitionist tracts and thus would want to end slavery even at the cost of the wholesale massacre of whites. No, blacks could not be allowed to become literate, and in every southern state after 1831, laws were passed which comprehensively outlawed the education of any and all African Americans.
Yet such hysterical legislation did not stop Maryville College from its by definition illegal practice of accepting black students. To be certain, the number of blacks to attend the College in the antebellum era was never very large and there appears to be little documentation to determine an accurate tally before the Civil War. Nevertheless, the Presbyterians maintained the high moral ground and continually breached the law and educated Negroes. So, in the forty-two years from its establishment in 1819 as the Western Theological Seminary until its closing in 1861 because of the Civil War, Cherokee Indians, Negroes, and whites were educated at Maryville College.
There was no official college policy concerning the education of Negroes at the college until after the war. In October 1865, the Presbyterian Synod of Tennessee met and voted to reopen the college. A resolution written by three faculty members said in part:
...we have in the midst of nearly four million freed men....[the] obstacles to their improvement and elevation...having been swept away, a door is now opened...there can be but one mind and one voice among Christians....we deem it our solemn duty to encourage...every exertion made for their intellectual, moral, and religious improvement.
On September 28, 1867, while meeting in Athens, the College Directors adopted a forthright policy in regard to educating the freedmen. According to the minutes of the meeting, since the college had not excluded blacks before the Civil War, there was no reason to exclude them now at the end of hostilities. The Directors believed that it was "much to the credit of the institution that it has...[excluded] none from its benefits by reason of race or color." The next year the Directors, meeting this time in Greeneville, upheld the policy that "no person...shall be excluded by reason of race or color." This delighted a number of northern businessmen-philanthropists, foremost among them William Thaw of Pittsburgh, who made substantial contributions to the college with the caveat that blacks continue to be educated at Maryville College. The post-war policy regarding biracial education was thus set by 1868, but there would be challenges to this egalitarian covenant.
In 1872 three African-American students applied for admission into the Animi Cultus, a student society which had a well deserved reputation as being antagonistic to the idea of biracial schooling at Maryville College. (The Animi Cultus Society had no objection to the idea of a white gender-based co-educational policy.) A great controversy occurred in which the three students were rejected from membership on account of their race. Three of the Animi Cultus members, however, resigned and two joined the rival literary association, the Athenian Society.
Seven years later animosity towards black students rose again when a petition bearing fifty student signatures was presented to college President Peter Mason Bartlett. It contained fifty signatures, most of which were those of Animi Cultus members. The document appealed to Bartlett to dismiss Negro students at once. The President unhesitatingly agreed to the student demands. He wrote, for example, to the more preeminent of the college Trustees, asking them to support his exclusionary policy. They refused to sustain his request. Bartlett then contacted William Thaw saying it was no longer prudent for the college to pursue a policy of integration and requested that he continue his liberal financial support. Thaw, however, let it be known that if a policy of segregation was to be implemented, he would no longer feel compelled to render his ample pecuniary assistance to Maryville College. President Bartlett, however, would for the time being stay the course.
Thaw then wrote an elaborate and protracted letter to the college faculty announcing that his thirteen years of financial support must conclude because of the reversal of the policy of integration. Thaw's letter shocked the faculty as it revealed Bartlett's heretofore secret activities on this issue. The faculty, following Professor Thomas Jefferson Lamar's lead, wrote to Thaw persuading him of their affirmation of the principles upon which Maryville College had been built. All faculty members and a now reconverted President Bartlett signed the statement. Thaw was satisfied and continued his support of the college. As Maryville College Professor G.S.W. Crawford pointedly put it: "Thus the College was rescued from the brink of destruction. And the whole cause of this trouble can be traced directly to the Animi Cultus Society."
Knowing that the Animi Cultus was fomenting trouble on the Maryville College campus, faculty members began in the summer of 1881 to formulate a process for improving the Society, to bring it into harmony with the racial policies of the school. A so-called "allotment system" was established where new students would be assigned alternately and alphabetically to each of the literary societies. However, this latter-day quota system pleased neither students, nor the Athenian nor the Animi Cultus Societies. Ultimately, the faculty informed the Animi Cultus that the matter would be considered closed once it adopted the following clause to its constitution: "Any student of Maryville sustaining a good moral character may become a regular member of this Society." The Society adopted the clause after much debate, to the great relief of the faculty.
Accordingly, in January 1882, one black freshman applied for membership with Animi Cultus. Because a mistake in punctuation was noted, the student's application was rejected. Members claimed their rival, the Athenian, was fomenting trouble and trying to break up Animi Cultus. The Negro student made yet another application but in the face of unrelenting white reacist student opposition discreetly withdrew it. Shortly thereafter two members were advised by an illustrious alumni, the Rev. E. A. Elmore of New York, to solicit yet another black student for membership. They did and were denounced by their fellows as traitors and enemies of the Society. According to Professor Crawford, Animi Cultus members robustly: "yelled & stamped until they were heard all over campus. The next day everybody was wild with excitement, wondering what the faculty would do about such rowdyism."
At first the faculty did nothing, not so much out of fear, but more out of a concern to allow the situation to defuse a bit. They received a petition from the Animi Cultus Society which was signed by twenty-seven of its members. It claimed the exclusive prerogative of directing their association as they pleased, completely autonomous from the faculty. Professors, while they were not ebullient with the petition, maintained their learned and stately deportment while waiting for President Bartlett to return from Knoxville before taking any action.
On the evening of February 6, 1882, while the faculty met in the president's study to discuss the recent difficulties, they were advised that the membership of Animi Cultus were removing furniture from their college-owned residence hall. Members of the faculty wasted no time in arriving on the scene to lodge a stern rebuke and protest, but the Animi Cultus members were not deterred, and sequestered themselves and the furniture to a hall they had engaged in town.
Faculty members returned to the president's study and straightaway arrived at a consensus that the campus was in the midst of a genuine "College rebellion." Early on February 7, during morning chapel, it was announced that on the 8th the names of the offending students would be read with a resolution authorizing their suspension. The next morning, in the midst of deafening stillness, the names of those to be suspended were read. Some of the boys appeared to have been struck by a thunderbolt, never believing that the faculty would banish so many young men from prominent and respectable families. Twenty-three were suspended and the Animi Cultus Society was abolished. One Maryville resident, under the nom de plume of "Phil A. Buster" wrote to the editor of the Knoxville Daily Tribune informing readers that "the students [are] claiming States rights, and protection under the Constitution, while the Faculty quoted the Fifteenth Amendment and a centralized power [as] the essential in this case."
After signing a paper drawn up by President Bartlett almost all of the twenty-three offending students recanted their activities of February 6 and were later reinstated. The remaining student body of 112 collegians returned within a few days of the showdown and campus life returned to the scholastic workaday routine. News of this incident reached newspapers in New York, Cincinnati, Chicago, and Knoxville. Those enraged students who were not readmitted talked freely to the press and interested groups or individuals while the faculty maintained its silence, and so a negative twist resulted in which professors and administrators were maligned. In one instance a Blount County farmer, after hearing the horror story the suspended students said; "Boys be firm & if it comes to the musket, I'll be with you." Eventually, however, a reaction set in against the rebel students and the College regained what small amount of prestige it may have lost. The sixty three year old custom, principle, and policy of integrated admission was sustained at Maryville College in 1882. Yet a reactionary segregationist segue would occur in some nineteen years which would at once end the school's liberal policy of biracial education.
There apparently was little overt objection to African-American students at Maryville College until the Commencement of 1895, on May 30. As was typical of the time, graduating seniors would compete for cash prizes, sometimes awarded for the best orator. P.A. Wallace, an African-American student, won the $15.00 first prize for male students with his discourse entitled "Preface." Many white students and their parents protested causing quite a commotion, but the faculty maintained its moral courage and decided Wallace had won the prize fairly and squarely. However, the black student's award winning oration ended forever the competition which was abandoned thereafter as a result of the controversy.
In 1901 the Tennessee State Legislature passed legislation which extended segregation of the races to private schools. While the statute was directly aimed at Maryville College it also applied to other private institutions of higher learning in the Volunteer State, most notably Fisk University and Roger Williams College, all of which followed a nonexclusionary admission's policy. Ironically, one of the student participants in the Animi Cultus rebellion in 1882 had his revenge, as he was most responsible for drafting the law. In the thirty-five years from the end of the Civil War and the imposition of segregation in the first year of the twentieth century, some sixty African Americans attended Maryville College, and at least eighteen became teachers and fourteen became ministers. The Rev. Job C. Lawrence, a black political and social activist in Knoxville in the 1880s, for example, was a graduate of Maryville College. But it would not be until 1954 when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the separate but equal provisions of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) in the decision Brown v. Board that the walls of segregation would begin to disintegrate. Then and only then would the original liberal policy of biracial education at Maryville College be reinstated and so vindicated.
The history of integrated education in the Volunteer State was early on expressed by the Presbyterian Church's desire to educate as broad a segment of the population as possible, which made the institution unique in Tennessee's striking and colorful experience. At no time did black students number a majority, nor even in a large minority, at Maryville College. Nevertheless, this generally unrecognized chapter of Tennessee history demonstrates the variety of experience in our common past, and it shows us that school integration was not altogether unknown before the middle of the twentieth century, a perception many might otherwise fail to grasp.
The coming of integrated schools in Tennessee is not just the product of the battles of the Civil War, or one United States Supreme Court case in 1954, but includes the history of the African-American struggle to participate in higher education at Maryville College. Maryville College was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1982 as a historic district, testifying in part to its distinction in the history of biracial schooling in the Volunteer State.
For more information on Maryville College see the following:
Return to the Tennessee History Resource Page
E-mail
E-mail his son, the Webmaster and Oberlin College alumnus, Boyd R. Jones.