Beginning as an Evergreen educator in 1972 (an original faculty compared to the college’s founding in 1971), Dr. Maxine Mimms was the force behind the foundation of the Evergreen Tacoma Campus. Through underground organization, Mimms extended the operations of the Olympia campus to a historically Black neighborhood in Tacoma where Mimms recognized an absence of accessible higher education for adult and working students
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As a Tacoma resident and an Olympia faculty, Mimms would work with other Evergreen Olympia faculty to culminate course materials and planning, and to enroll Tacoma-based students. Mimms would then host these students at her own kitchen table, guiding them through study and seminars, while also funding the operational costs of this project.
In addition to African American, adult, and working students, Mimms’ focus in extending Evergreen Olympia to Tacoma also sought to support those with adverse secondary and post-secondary educational experiences, seeking those with missing high school credits or who had struggled at other colleges. And for these classes to be truly accessible to working folks also taking night classes, Mimms would teach Tacoma students in her home at 5 am before traveling to the Olympia campus to continue teaching for Evergreen’s public policy program.
As Mimms’ enrollment encouragement succeeded, her home-based alternative education program grew. Mimms’ group of students soon outgrew the space of her home, requiring the group to take the program to a larger location, which the increasing enrollment soon outgrew as well. Expanding beyond these temporary spaces, Mimms finally had the numbers to prove the need for a second Evergreen campus in the Tacoma Hilltop neighborhood. Mimms’ Tacoma based extension would be confirmed for its own campus where Evergreen Tacoma would permanently reside, and officially open for enrollment in 1982.
Mimms who had become the program director of the Tacoma campus, continued to advocate for the expansion of Evergreen Tacoma. Representative of Mimms’ mission, the Evergreen Tacoma campus mascot—in addition to Speedy—became the Adinkra symbol of Sankofa. This symbol is translated to “go back and fetch it,” associated with the proverb “it is not wrong to go back for that which you have forgotten,” resonating with Mimms’ mission of encouraging adult and working students to begin their journey to higher education and encouraging those with adverse college experiences to return to their higher education.
As a Ph.D. student at the time, Mimms’ dissertation represents her advancements for equitable education as well as entitled: “Higher Education: A Pedagogical and Curricular Design for Adult Black Americans.”
Evergreen Tacoma was hardly the extent of Mimms’ educational service as she also developed the Maxine Mimms Academy in 2004 to serve folks displaced by public education through suspension or expulsion, based in the Tacoma area.
As an extraordinary figure in closing gaps in education equity, Mimms oriented her work in education to evoking confidence in students through accessible, and achievable education. Her work serving the Tacoma and greater area responded to the Hilltop student community in Tacoma without access to higher education accommodative to a working week schedule. Under Mimms’ service to Evergreen Tacoma, tens of thousands of degrees have been awarded, speaking to the expansion of her legacy beyond the foundation of Evergreen Tacoma and to the development of the educational sphere as a whole, enriching the lives of many.
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