The courage of Autherine Lucy

Autherine Lucy Foster graduates from University of Alabama in 1992, 36 years after her suspension and expulsion

Finding the courage to walk through a screaming, angry white mob that swelled to almost 3,000 racists all calling for your death, shouting racial epithets, throwing rotten produce, setting fires, and rampaging is an onerous task for even the most committed non-violent civil rights activist.

Autherine Juanita Lucy, now Autherine Lucy Foster, was not a trained civil rights worker prepared to suffer harm or die. She was a young black woman who had applied to the University of Alabama to acquire a second degree. She was accepted—then rejected when the administration discovered she was not white. After several years of court proceedings initiated by the NAACP, a court order forced the hand of the university and she was admitted.

This is what she faced.

She attended her first class on Friday February 3, 1956. On Monday February 6, 1956 riots broke out on the campus and a mob of more than a thousand men pelted the car in which the Dean of Women drove Lucy between classes. Threats were made against her life and the presidents home was stoned. The police were called to secure her admission. These riots at the university were what was, to date, the most violent post-Brown anti-integration demonstration

During Black History Month, we often see profiles of well-known African Americans who were leaders of different civil rights actions. It’s important that we also honor the courage of individuals who were not heading up organizations, whose courage in the face of adversity opened the doors for others, and helped achieve changes that are still in place today. We are currently watching black students and their allies demonstrate on college campuses across the U.S., so the task is not yet done. However, we should remember those black students who opened the doors where none had gone before.

Autherine Lucy Foster is one of those students.

Roy Wilkins in press conference with Autherine Lucy and Thurgood Marshall, director and special counsel for NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, March 2, 1956.

The beginning

Autherine Juanita Lucy was born in the small farming community of Shiloh, Alabama, on October 5, 1929. The youngest of ten children, Juanita, as she preferred to be called, grew up on the 110-acre farm maintained by her parents, Minnie Hosea Lucy and Milton Cornelius Lucy. Like her siblings, Lucy was no stranger to hard work and helped her family pick cotton and harvest crops. However, she was a bit awkward and often fell behind the others. She was also very shy, giving no inkling of the civil rights pioneer she would become.

What she lacked in physical stamina, Lucy made up for in intelligence, and she excelled in reading, grammar, and spelling. After graduating from high school she attended Selma University and earned a two-year teaching degree. Later she attended Miles College in Fairfield, Alabama, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in English in 1952. It was at Miles that Lucy met two of the most influential people in her life. One, Hugh Lawrence Foster, would later become her husband. The second, Pollie Anne Myers, would propel Lucy to the forefront of the civil rights movement.

Where Lucy was shy, Myers was extroverted. Where Lucy preferred to study quietly, Myers complemented her studies with activism in the youth chapter of the NAACP. Despite their differences, the two women became fast friends. A few months after their graduation, Myers called Lucy and asked her if she wanted to apply to the University of Alabama for graduate studies. The state’s premier educational institution—while not having a written policy against admitting black students—was in practice and tradition an all-white school. No black student had ever been admitted. “I thought she was joking at first, I really did,” Lucy said, as quoted in The Schoolhouse Door.

Lucy wound up having to go through the ordeal alone, without her friend Pollie Myers Hudson.

On June 29, 1955, the NAACP secured a court order preventing the University from rejecting the admission applications of Lucy and Myers (who had married and was then known as Pollie Myers Hudson) based upon their race.  Autherine was finally admitted to the University of Alabama but rejected Hudson on the grounds that a child she had conceived before marriage made her an unsuitable student. However, Autherine was barred from all dormitories and dining halls. Days later, the court amended the order to apply to all other African-American students seeking admission. At least two sources have said that the board hoped that without Hudson, the more outgoing and assured of the pair and whose idea it originally was to enroll at Alabama, Lucy's own acceptance would mean little or nothing to her, and she would voluntarily choose not to attend. But Hudson and others strongly encouraged her, and on February 3, 1956, Lucy enrolled as a graduate student in library science, becoming the first African American ever admitted to a white public school or university in the state.

What irony. To enforce an immoral regime, the University deigned to question the morals of a student applicant.

In February 1956, a mob of people assembled on campus. They all had one thing in common: they wanted to stop desegregation. They chanted racist slogans. They insulted Lucy, threw eggs at her, and threatened, "Let's kill her!"

Looking at photos of the mob that gathered on the campus—so many of them young—it is hard at times to comprehend how so much hate is instilled so early in people’s lives.

I wonder where the members of that mob who gathered on the campus are today. I wonder how they are raising their own children.

After she was expelled from the school “for her protection,” Thurgood Marshall took it upon himself to become her protector.

... Marshall was so concerned about her safety that he brought her to New York to stay in his home with him and his wife, Cecilia. Lucy said later, "I just felt so secure with Mr. Marshall and his wife. . . . How grateful I have been over all these years for the protection and the kindness he gave to me."

The attempt to overturn her expulsion by NAACP lawyers Arthur Shores and Thurgood Marshall failed, and had far-reaching consequences in her life.

Autherine and the NAACP filed contempt-of-court proceedings against the trustees and president of the University; against the dean of women for barring her from the dining hall and dormitories, and against four other men (none connected to the university) for participating in the riots. The federal courts ordered that Lucy be reinstated after the university had taken adequate measures to protect her. When she was reinstated on February 29 by court order of the Birmingham Federal Court the University trustees met and expelled her permanently on a hastily contrived technicality. The university used the case as a justification for her permanent expulsion. University officials claimed that Lucy had slandered the university and they could not have her as a student.

The NAACP, feeling that further legal action was pointless, did not contest this decision. Lucy, tired and scared, acquiesced. In April 1956, in Dallas, Lucy married Hugh Foster, a divinity student (and later a minister) whom she had met at Miles College. For some months afterward she was a civil rights advocate, making speeches at NAACP meetings around the country. But by the end of the year, her active involvement in the civil rights movement had ceased. For the next seventeen years, Lucy and her family lived in various cities in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas. Her notoriety made it difficult at first for her to find employment as a teacher. The Fosters moved back to Alabama in 1974, and Lucy obtained a position in the Birmingham school system.

The following video news series covers the history.

On May 9, 1992, Autherine Lucy Foster finally graduated, sharing the honors with her daughter Grazia Foster, who graduated the same day. 

For an in-depth look at the entire history placed in the context of the time period I suggest you read The Schoolhouse Door by E. Culpepper Clark, who is in the videos above.

The Schoolhouse Door: Segregation's Last Stand at the University of Alabama

On June 11, 1963, in a dramatic gesture that caught the nation's attention, Governor George Wallace physically blocked the entrance to Foster Auditorium on the University of Alabama's campus. His intent was to defy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, sent on behalf of the Kennedy administration to force Alabama to accept court-ordered desegregation. After a tense confrontation, President Kennedy federalized the Alabama National Guard and Wallace backed down, allowing Vivian Malone and James Hood to become the first African Americans to enroll successfully at their state's flagship university. That night, John F. Kennedy went on television to declare civil rights a "moral issue" and to commit his administration to this cause. That same night, Medgar Evers was shot dead. In The Schoolhouse Door, E. Culpepper Clark provides a riveting account of the events that led to Wallace's historic stand, tracing a tangle of intrigue and resistance that stretched from the 1940s, when the university rejected black applicants outright, to the post-Brown v. Board of Education era. We are there in July 1955 when Thurgood Marshall and lawyers at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund win for Autherine Lucy and "all similarly situated" the right to enroll at the university. We are in the car with Lucy in February 1956 as university officials escort her to class, shielding her from a mob jeering "Lynch the nigger," "Keep 'Bama white," and "hit the nigger whore." (After only three days, these demonstrations resulted in Lucy's expulsion.) Clark exposes the many means, including threats and intimidation, used by university and state officials to discourage black applicants following the Lucy episode. And he explains how University of Alabama president Frank Anthony Rose eventually cooperated with the Kennedy administration to ensure a smooth transition toward desegregation. We also witness Robert Kennedy's remarkable face-to-face plea for Wallace's cooperation and the governor's adamant refusal: "I will never submit voluntarily to any integration in a school system in Alabama." As Clark writes, Wallace's carefully orchestrated surrender would leave the forces of white supremacy free to fight another day. And the Kennedys' public embrace of the civil rights movement would set in motion a political transformation that changed the presidential base of the Democratic party for the next thirty years. In these pages, full of courageous black applicants, fist-shaking demonstrators, and powerful politicians, Clark captures the dramatic confrontations that transformed the University of Alabama into a proving ground for the civil rights movement and gave the nation unforgettable symbols for its struggle to achieve racial justice.

It’s hopeful that university officials have taken steps to acknowledge the past. They are currently being challenged to do better.

Here at the University of Alabama, a group of students and faculty has joined the movement. They call themselves “We are Done.”

“The University of Alabama is at a crucial period in its history,” the group says on its Facebook page. “While behind us lies decades of intolerance, exclusivity and inequity, in front of us lies the opportunity to create a campus that is welcoming of all students.”

Today, a clock tower named for Autherine Lucy stands on the campus. Today, there is a scholarship in her name. This plaque at the base of that tower shares her words for future generations.

“My response to fear is: do it anyway.  Let nothing stop you.

You have to push forward.”

Plaque commemorating Autherine Lucy on the east face of the Autherine Lucy Clock Tower in Malone Hood Plaza on the campus of the University of Alabama