In Memoriam: Maxine Mimms, 1928-2024

Maxine Mimms, former professor at Evergreen State College, passed away on October 8. She was 96 years old.

Dr. Mimms began her career as an elementary teacher at Seattle Public Schools. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, she served as a teacher and an administrator with a focus on recruiting teachers from historically Black colleges and universities. She briefly served as the Seattle Public Schools’ project director for a district-wide teacher training program in intergroup relations, financed by the Civil Rights Act. In 1969, she moved to Washington, D.C. to serve as special assistant to Elizabeth Duncan Koontz, the first African American director of the Women’s Bureau.

In 1972, Dr. Mimms returned to Washington state and joined the faculty at the recently founded Evergreen State College in Olympia. At the time, she lived in Tacoma, where there were no public four-year institutions. She helped numerous students from Tacoma – many of whom were African American – to enroll in Evergreen State and taught them in her own home before and after her work at the Olympia campus. A decade after she joined the faculty, the college received formal approval to establish an official campus in Tacoma.

Dr. Mimms served as director of the Tacoma campus until her retirement in 1992. She went on to found the Maxine Mimms Academy in Tacoma, a nonprofit that provided daily mentoring and classes for middle school students who had been expelled or suspended from their public school.

A native of Newport News, Virginia, Dr. Mimms earned her bachelor’s degree in education from Virginia Union University, master’s degree from Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, and Ph.D. in education administration from the Union Graduate School in San Francisco, California.

Related Articles

Leave a Reply

Get the JBHE Weekly Bulletin

Receive our weekly email newsletter delivered to your inbox

Latest News

Spelman College Receives Federal Grant to Establish Academic Center for International Strategic Affairs

“This grant enables Spelman to prepare a cohort of students to take their rightful places in conversations that will shape, define and critique international strategic affairs and national security issues and help build a better world,” said Tinaz Pavri, principal investigator of the grant.

Two Black Scholars Appointed to Endowed Professorships

John Thabiti Willis at Grinnell College in Iowa and Squire Booker at the University of Pennsylvania have been appointed to endowed professorships.

University Press of Kentucky Consortium Welcomes Simmons College of Kentucky

Simmons College of Kentucky has joined the University Press of Kentucky consortium, bringing a new HBCU perspective to its editorial board and future publications.

Danielle Speller Recognized by the National Society of Black Physicists for Early-Career Accomplishments

Danielle Spencer currently serves as an assitant professor of physics at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. She was honored by the National Society of Black Physicists for her research into dark matter and her mentorship of the next generation of physicists.

Featured Jobs