Tennessee State University
| Tennessee State University (TSU) | |
|---|---|
|
|
| motto | Think, work, serve |
| founding | June 19, 1912 |
| place | Nashville |
| state |
 Tennessee
|
| country |
 United States
|
| management | Melvin N. Johnson |
| Students | 10,389 |
| Foundation assets | $ 135.8 million |
| Website | www.tnstate.edu |
The Tennessee State University ( TSU ) is the only state historically African-American university (HBCU). It was in 1912 as Tennessee Normal School for Negroes founded in Nashville in the US state of Tennessee area. In its current form, it has existed since the merger of Tennessee State University with the former University of Tennessee at Nashville in 1979. In addition to the main campus, there is the Avon Williams campus in downtown Nashville.
Faculties
- Health sciences
- Engineering, technology and computer science
- Arts and sciences
- Agriculture and Consumer Science
- pedagogy
- maintenance
- Economics
- Graduate Studies and Research
- Institute of Government
Sports
The name of the teams in the athletics department is Tigers . The college is now a member of the Ohio Valley Conference in Division 1 of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). But it was also the first black college that could ever win a championship in college basketball . The team also integrated the hotels on the sidelines of the championship tournament in Missouri. Those basketball teams under coach John McLendon that were the first three college championships in a row between 1957 and 1959 in the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA) were renamed Tennessee Agricultural in 2019 under the original name (from 1927 to 1968) & Industrial State College inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame .
The Tigerbelles athletics club has achieved even greater fame, especially at the Olympic Games . Founded in 1943, it was modeled after Cleve Abbott's Tigerettes athletics program at the Tuskegee Institute , which had fizzled out a bit after World War II . College President Walter S. Davis, as a civil servant, aggressively sought to make Tennessee A & I State the equivalent of the University of Tennessee in all matters and at all levels, including sport. He therefore hired Ed Temple in 1950 as an athletics coach. With no travel budget at all, this high school recruited talent through an Amateur Athletic Union summer college program. The main focus was on the sprint . Audrey Patterson had already won bronze in the 200-meter race in London in 1948 , Temple won silver in the long jump and bronze in the 4 x 100 meter race with a relay of four Tennessee State athletes in Melbourne through Willye White in 1956 . Until the 1970s he achieved this success only with college work scholarships. The first star of the program was the "black gazelle" Wilma Rudolph with three gold medals in Rome in 1960 and Ed Temple as coach of the United States Olympic Committee . The foreboding of an Olympic dynasty of the Tigerbelles appeared in Tokyo in 1964 . Wyomia Tyus and Edith McGuire won gold. Wyomia Tyus was the first female sprinter to ever defend her gold medal in Mexico City in 1968 - the year she won university . The Tigerbelles' success declined from the 1970s as more and more colleges in the southern states integrated . Nevertheless: In Ed Temple's 44 years as a coach, the Tigerbelles became national champions in 34 years and won over twenty Olympic medals with 13 Tigerbelles between 1956 in Melbourne and 1976 in Montreal , eleven of them gold.
The name Tigerbelle already suggests that the athletes placed great value on a very feminine image. This was necessary because women's competitions were exposed to extreme criticism at the time, and female athletes were generally denied their femininity in the 1920s and 1930s. Even sports teachers viewed women's competitions critically, which is why so-called playdays and telegraph meetings were introduced, which diluted and softened the competition. In contrast to white amateur athletes, African American women were used to hard physical work, so that the myth of sterility through athletics was ineffective for them. The Tigerbelles , like the Tigerettes before, paved the way for other female athletes with their gold medals, because in the times of the Cold War it was not possible to do without female athletes, as the conflicts between the two power blocs had been moved to the cinder tracks. Similar to the Harlem Globetrotters , the Tigerbelles were also used as goodwill ambassadors for the American Way of Life on trips through, for example, Africa. And of course, like the Tigers , the Tigerbelles played an important role in the civil rights movement against racial segregation . Wilma Rudolph was believed to be the first African American woman to be described as "pretty" in the white press, and both John McLendon and Ed Temple later held high positions on the United States Olympic Committee in a victory over Jim Crow .
Personalities
- Ralph Boston - Olympic Champion
- Chandra Cheeseborough - Olympic Champion
- Robert Covington - basketball player
- Isabelle Daniels - Olympian
- Mae "Toots" Faggs - Olympic Champion
- Martha "Pee Wee" Hudson - Olympic Champion
- Barbara "BJ" Jones - Olympic Champion
- Ed "Too Tall" Jones - American football player
- Madeline Manning - Olympic Champion
- Anthony Mason - basketball player
- Margaret Matthews - Olympian
- Edith McGuire - Olympic Champion
- Kathy McMillan - Olympian
- Brenda Morehead - Olympian
- Audrey Patterson - Olympian
- Dominique Rodgers-Cromartie - American football player
- Wilma "Skeeter" Rudolph - Olympic champion
- Leon Thomas - singer
- Rufus Thomas - singer
- Wyomia Tyus - Olympic Champion
- Willye White - Olympian
- Lucinda "Little Dancer" Williams - Olympic Champion
- Oprah Winfrey - TV presenter
Web links
- Official website (English)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Milton S. Katz: Breaking Through. John B. McLendon, Basketball Legend and Civil Rights Pioneer. Fayetteville, 2007: The University of Arkansas Press. ISBN 1-55728-847-X (pages 75-110, in English).
- ^ Better than the Best. Black Athletes Speak, 1920-2007. edited by John C. Walter and Malina Iida. Seattle / London, 2010: University of Washington Press. ISBN 978-0-295-99053-8 (pages 39–57 and 133–149, in English).
- ↑ Jennifer H. Lansbury: A Spectacular Leap. Black Women Athletes in Twentieth-Century America. Fayetteville, 2014: The University of Arkansas Press. ISBN 978-1-55728-658-1 (pages 115-190, in English).
- ^ Carroll van West: The Tennessee State Tigerbelles: Cold Warriors of the Track. in: Separate Games. African American Sport behind the Walls of Segregation. edited by David K. Wiggins and Ryan A. Swanson. Fayetteville, 2016: The University of Arkansas Press. ISBN 978-1-68226-017-3 (pages 61-71, in English).
Coordinates: 36 ° 9 ′ 57.1 ″ N , 86 ° 49 ′ 49.2 ″ W.