A Tacoma educator who taught college courses from her Hilltop home built what became the Evergreen State College Tacoma campus.
A sixth-grade teacher at Bryant School inspired students for more than 30 years. And in 1968, college students packed City Hall to fight an ordinance they called a threat to free speech.
Those stories, drawn from the Tacoma Public Library's Northwest Room archives, are the subject of a new blog post published Tuesday, Sept. 1, by project archivist Heather Lowcock.
The post is part of the library's "13 Ways of Looking at the Northwest" series, which draws on the News Tribune Photograph Collection. A grant from the National Historic Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) at the National Archives supported the collection's digitization.
A home that became a campus
Dr. Maxine Mimms, who died Oct. 8, 2024, at age 96, joined the Evergreen State College faculty in 1972.
She began teaching a handful of students in her Hilltop home, serving people who could not easily reach the Olympia campus.
"College isn't just getting a degree," Mimms told the News Tribune in May 1979, while teaching her Evergreen course from the Colored Women's Club in Tacoma.
"It's learning something and returning it back to the community."
That home program grew into the Evergreen State College Tacoma campus, formally established at 12th and Martin Luther King Jr. Way in 1982. The campus moved to its permanent location on 6th Avenue in 2001.
By 2018, more than 2,700 students had graduated from the program, according to HistoryLink.org.
Mimms, born in Newport News, Virginia, had been Seattle Public Schools' first contracted African American elementary teacher before joining Evergreen, according to her obituary.
On her 90th birthday in 2018, Mayor Victoria Woodards presented her with a key to the city.
After retiring from Evergreen, Mimms founded the Maxine Mimms Academy in 2004 to serve middle-school-aged students who had been expelled from other schools. The academy's curriculum includes hydroponic gardening, STEAM and college preparatory classes, according to HistoryLink.org.
33 years at Bryant School
The archives also preserve the papers of Marguerite Neely Davy, who taught sixth grade at Bryant School from 1925 to 1958. Her collection in the Northwest Room includes student assignments, essays, poems and letters.
One former student, Beverly Jean Rogers, wrote to Davy in 1941: "I would do sixth grade over again just to have you as a teacher once more."
A 1968 protest at City Hall
In November 1968, students from Tacoma Community College (TCC) and the University of Puget Sound (UPS) protested Tacoma City Council Ordinance No. 18669. The ordinance, passed in a 7-2 vote, banned the circulation of materials that "may incite crime, violence, or disrespect to enforcement officers."
Students picketed outside the City-County Building, held a teach-in rally at TCC and packed the council meeting, spilling into hallways. At the Nov. 12, 1968, council meeting, Mayor Rasmussen told the crowd that neither the council nor the students could determine whether the law violated the constitution.
The students failed to win repeal. The ordinance was later amended, and the provision is no longer part of Tacoma's municipal code. The Northwest Room holds the student publication "The Iconoclast," produced by the Student Free Thought Committee that year.
