By Peter Wallenstein
published in the Journal of East Tennessee History, Vol 96, 2024
As summer neared its end in 1954, three young women from East Tennessee stepped out of their homes in the town of Alcoa and headed over to the campus of Maryville College. A few months earlier, all three—Shirley M. Carr, Queen Elizabeth Crossing, and Louise Hill—had become graduates of the Charles M. Hall School, the Black high school in Alcoa. Even more than most teenagers beginning their first term in college, they no doubt approached their new adventure with both anticipation and apprehension. They would have known that they were going to be the first Black students in more than a half-century to take classes at the college. They likely knew, too, that they were the very first Black female students ever to enroll at Maryville.
Maryville College had an origin story, or early history, perhaps unique to higher education in all the eleven states that, for four years, had comprised the Confederate States of America. Union victory in the Civil War and its aftermath brought an end to the slave system in Tennessee, plus an opportunity for Black children there to go to school and even advance to higher education. Beginning in 1868, Maryville had enrolled young Black and white students for more than three decades. But a Tennessee state law, passed in 1901, put an end to any such experiment in biracial higher education. After that, for decade after decade, Maryville had been a white-only college— or, rather, a non-Black school, since young people of various Asian ethnicities attended during the long era of segregation.
In 1954, the legal environment suddenly changed enough to permit the college to reopen its doors to prospective Black students. Six people—four young Black women and two young Black men—jumped at the opportunity to “reintegrate” Maryville College.
The “Maryville Six,” as they came to be known, have been virtually invisible in the historical record of the desegregation of higher education in the South during the 1950s and 1960s. Their experiences as pioneers in college desegregation deserve revisiting regardless—and also can serve as a case study, a guide for appreciating similar pioneers and institutional change elsewhere
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As Tennessee marks the 230th anniversary of its admission to the Union, it is worth remembering that statehood was neither simple nor inevitable. From the failed State of Franklin to the creation of the Southwest Territory and eventual statehood in 1796, Tennessee’s story reflects the challenges and opportunities of building a new nation on the Appalachian frontier.
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By Kristin Brig
published in the Journal of East Tennessee History, Vol 88, 2016
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After the Revolution, East Tennessee remained a volatile frontier where the U.S., the Cherokee, and settlers all claimed authority. The 1791 Treaty of Holston tried to bring order, but its promises quickly unraveled—even as it marked the moment when the region’s political foundations began to take shape.