Would-be killers sought to murder Alabama’s first black university student

On the first day shy Autherine Lucy went to university, she set off riots and was expelled. Last month, a University of Alabama hall was named after her.

Autherine Lucy reads a statement prepared by her lawyers at a press conference after being expelled from Alabama University.Picture: Getty Images

Autherine Juanita Lucy, teacher, born on October 5, 1929, in Shiloh, Alabama. Died aged 92 on March 2, in Bessemer, Alabama.

A morally deformed mob of perhaps 1200 gathered at the University of Alabama before midnight on February 3, 1956. Led by one of the students – white supremacist Leonard Wilson – they were in the mood for a lynching.

Their fury was sparked by the attendance that day on their campus of a young woman, Autherine Lucy. She hadn’t cheated at her exams, killed a child, or prayed to Satan. But she was black.

Wilson and his fellow students assumed she was living on campus. She hadn’t been allowed. So they marched past the imposing Bibb Graves Hall and set fire to papers that called for the desegregation of schools and universities and, urged on by an angry Wilson, who had climbed a flagpole to address the crowd, chanted “keep ’Bama white” and “to hell with Autherine”. Others sang Dixie and waved Confederate flags.

The following morning the car in which Lucy arrived to start day two was attacked. In a full-on riot, bricks and eggs were thrown at her. They wanted to kill the passenger.

Staff hid Lucy in Bibb Graves Hall and called the National Guard to safely escort her away. The university president, a grandly named but contemptibly weak Oliver Cromwell Carmichael, temporarily expelled her to keep the peace. The mob had won.

A headline in one Alabama newspaper the following day stated: “Things are quiet in Tuscaloosa today. There is peace on the campus of the University of Alabama.”

On February 7, an opposition newspaper, The Tuscaloosa News, hit back at that with an editorial that won it a Pulitzer Prize. It asked: “What does it mean today at the University of Alabama, and here in Tuscaloosa, to have the law on your side? The answer has to be: Nothing, that is if a mob disagrees with you and the courts.”

The following Sunday, civil rights leader Martin Luther King delivered a famous sermon that questioned the value of that campus peace: “Yes, things are quiet in Tuscaloosa. Yes, there was peace on the campus, but it was peace at a great price … It is the type of peace that is obnoxious. It is the type of peace that stinks in the nostrils of the Almighty God.”

Courts ruled that Lucy must be reinstated. The university then claimed Lucy had brought the institution into disrepute and permanently expelled her. She briefly became the face of the civil rights movement, but was shy and soon retired to a quieter life.

Ironically, Harper Lee, who later wrote To Kill a Mockingbird, had been on the Alabama campus a few years earlier. That famous novel is based on her humble father, an extraordinary autodidact, who became a lawyer and who once represented two black men accused of killing a white shop owner. An all-white jury found them guilty and the father and son were hanged.

No black student attended Alabama University until 1963, and even then confronted what became known as the Stand in The Schoolhouse Door protest. Blocking that particular schoolhouse door was Alabama’s Democratic governor, George Wallace, who had studied law there and was ­famous for the racist battle cry “segregation now, segregation ­tomorrow, segregation forever”.

Wallace was on record as believing blacks were inferior, spread venereal disease and were “inclined to criminality”. (An ambitious man, when he ran for president in 1968, he considered KFC founder Colonel Sanders as a running mate before settling on a general, Curtis LeMay, who wanted to win the Vietnam War “in 90 days” using nuclear bombs.)

Only after fellow Democrats, then-president John Kennedy and his attorney-general brother, Robert Kennedy, decreed that the National Guard would come under federal control to guarantee access for black students did Wallace step aside. This episode forms a scene in 1994 film ­Forrest Gump, in which actor Tom Hanks is amusingly inserted into the confrontation.

Lucy was the youngest of 10 children and her father had been a struggling sharecropper who made axe handles on the side. Keen on an education, Lucy already had a degree in English. After Alabama, she married and had a family but her notoriety made it difficult to find a teaching role. She worked in Texas and Louisiana for a time and in 1974 returned to teach at an Alabama high school.

Only in 1988 did Alabama University rescind Lucy’s expulsion. She immediately re-enrolled and achieved a Master of Arts at age 62.

At her graduation in 1992, the university named a scholarship honouring her and unveiled a portrait of the woman they had once banned. Eight years later, they built the Autherine Lucy Clock Tower and awarded her an honorary doctorate.

Finally, the mob had lost.

Late last month, there was an uplifting last chapter in Lucy’s life. The Bibb Graves Hall that overlooked all those dramas had been named after the 38th governor of Alabama, a celebrated war hero who served as a colonel in France during World War I. Several buildings and bridges across the county were named after him. But Graves had been endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan and, it was revealed years later, had secretly been a member.

On February 25, Lucy was invited back to the university to attend the dedication and cut the ribbon on the building that has been renamed Autherine Lucy Hall.

“For you to bring me out today, the Lord must be on each of our sides,” she said before an audience of black and white lecturers and students. “If I am a master teacher, what I hope I am teaching you is that love will take care of everything in our world.”