The Debt: What Tennessee Owes Its HBCU

The Promise

Nashville Public Radio

Society & Culture

4.9 • 777 Ratings

🗓️ 9 December 2025

⏱️ 53 minutes

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Summary

In this one-hour special from WPLN and the Tennessee Lookout: What happens when government funding is withheld from a public university that's served generations of Black Tennesseans? And what could be possible if that debt were finally paid?

Credits:

This story was co-reported and co-produced by Camellia Burris and Emily Siner. Story editing by Meribah Knight and Miriam Kramer. Additional editing by Tony Gonzalez, Holly McCall, Joshua Moore, LaTonya Turner and Nina Cardona. Sound design by Joshua Moore. Fact-checking by Daniel Potter. Digital buildout by Mack Linebaugh and Megan Jones. Engineering by Liv Lombardi.

The Debt is a production of Nashville Public Radio and The Tennessee Lookout, with additional support from the Pulitzer Center and the Education Writers’ Association.

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Camilla Burris.
0:01.5	And I'm Emily Siner.
0:02.9	And this is The Debt.
0:05.7	The year is 1968.
0:08.4	It's less than two months after Martin Luther King was assassinated.
0:12.1	And a black law student named Rita Geyer decides to do something bold.
0:16.4	She is taking the state of Tennessee to court.
0:19.4	You know, maybe I was naive, but I really believed in the law.
0:25.1	Rita was in school at Vanderbilt in Nashville and teaching a class across town at Tennessee
0:29.5	State University.
0:30.7	I mean, Tennessee State at that time, it was very dilapidated in my sense.
0:35.3	TSU is the state's only historically black public university.
0:39.4	And even though separate but equal was no longer the law of the land,
0:42.9	it was obvious to her that this school was still being treated like a second-class institution.
0:48.8	And I, of course, was a law student and was learning all about civil rights and the legal remedies that were possible.
0:57.8	Rita Geyer was clerking for a white civil rights lawyer in town.
1:01.6	And together, they crafted a legal complaint.
1:04.5	It claimed the state of Tennessee wasn't giving TSU enough money for its salaries, its library, its buildings,
1:10.6	because it was a predominantly
1:12.3	black university.
1:13.7	The motivation was to get more resources than equal facilities.
1:21.2	Almost every southern state would go on to have its own version of the Geyer case, battling
	...

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