Jimmie Baxter was the first African American to hold this office. He was elected in 1969. When the votes were first counted, he had lost the election by two hundred votes, but the Student Tribunal declared the election to be invalid because of the requirement of placing Social Security numbers on the IBM ballots. In the second election, he had three hundred votes more than his closest competitor. In 1969 only 271 African American students attended UT, and Baxter received a plurality of the eight thousand votes cast.
Baxter first enrolled at UT in fall 1961, left in 1962 to serve in the air force, and returned in 1967. He received the bachelor’s degree in 1970 from the College of Business, with a major in economics, and graduated from the College of Law in 1973. He became the first African American assistant United States attorney in the Eastern District of Tennessee.