THIS STORY COURTESY THE KINGSPORT TIMES NEWS
Today, Gudger is curator of the Swift College Museum, located within the Price Public Community Center, near where the Swift campus was located.
For the past year, filmmaker William Isom II has been interviewing former Swift students, scanning their old photos and compiling their stories, the product of which will be broadcast on East Tennessee PBS on Saturday, Feb. 28 at noon. The TV station is WETP-TV, Channel 2 serving the Tri-Cities (outside of the Tri-Cities, consult your local PBS listings for date and time).
“The Swift Story” — produced and directed by Isom — focuses on the history of Swift College, its students and their experiences in a segregated, all-black college in the South for more than 70 years.
Aside from airing on PBS, “The Swift Story” will also be played on a loop at the museum for visitors, particularly the school field trip classes that come to the museum.
Today the musuem is a community center, but for decades, Price Public School was Rogersville’s all-black K-12 school located across Hasson Street from the Swift campus.
“When students come to the museum, a lot of them are surprised by what they learn here,” Gudger said. “What surprised me was that a lot of people in our own community don’t know about Swift and the important role it played in the history of Rogersville.”
In 1883, the first African-American graduate of Maryville College, the Rev. William H. Franklin, established an institution of higher learning for newly emancipated blacks. Isom said Swift Memorial Institute in Rogersville became a beacon of higher education in the rural South.
“The Swift Story” is told through newly discovered photographs, letters and documents, as well as interviews with Gudger; Lester Layman, author of “Blacks in Tennessee”; Dr. Bobby Lovett, author of “America’s Historically Black Colleges: A Narrative History 1837-2009”; Dr. Tom Bogart, president of Maryville College; as well as Swift alumni and Rogersville residents.
Ten years after the school’s founding, the academy’s first structure was actualized and named in honor of the Rev. Elijah E. Swift, president of the Board of Missions for Freedmen and pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Pennsylvania.
In 1901, because the state’s legislative body enacted a statute that closed Maryville College’s doors to African Americans, the school’s board of trustees voted to convey $25,000 of its endowment to Swift Memorial Institute.
Under President Franklin’s leadership, the school experienced growth and prosperity.
During the next decade, Swift Memorial College became Swift Memorial Junior College. As a junior college, the school flourished and continued its mission of providing an education to students from Tennessee and other southern states.
During the 1940s and 1950s, the National Board of Missions began reassessing the feasibility of operating the 20 schools located in the South and in 1952 discontinued its support for Swift.
In 1955, Swift Memorial Junior College closed. The boys’ dormitory was used by the Hawkins County Board of Education as a segregated public high school until 1964, when Hawkins County schools were desegregated.
Today, the old Swift campus is owned by Hawkins County Schools, and the college president’s home is used as the district’s Central Office.
Isom added, “ ‘The Swift Story” shows what we can achieve together when we act boldly and in the interest of the most vulnerable of our neighbors.”
“The Swift Story” is made possible thanks to financial support from the Tennessee Arts Commission, Eastman Chemical Co., US Bank and the Tennessee Valley Authority.
