This story was produced by the Tennessee Lookout and WPLN News, with support from the Pulitzer Center and the Education Writers Association.
Less than two months after Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, a Black law student in Nashville named Rita Geier set off a series of events that ultimately reshaped higher education in Tennessee and around the country.
Geier was attending Vanderbilt University in Nashville, clerking for white Civil Rights lawyer George Barrett and teaching a class across town at Tennessee State University, which was called Tennessee A&I at the time. The school is the state’s only historically Black public university…