In Memoriam: Maxine Mimms, 1928-2024

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

Dr. Mimms began her career as an elementary school teacher in Seattle. 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 of the Department of Labor.

In 1972, Dr. Mimms returned to Washington State and joined the faculty at the recently founded Evergreen State College. 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 organization 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, a master’s degree from Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, and Ph.D. in education administration from the Union Graduate School.