Barred at the Schoolhouse Door

...After the two were rejected, they consulted Arthur D. Shores, Birmingham's most eminent black lawyer and the NAACP Fund's counsel in Alabama...

...Although that morning was terrifying, she said she was rarely frightened on other occasions...

...The national press did not allude to the Klan, but the local papers and University officials did—at length and often...

...She spoke with pleasure about riding in any seat on the bus, staying in any motel, eating in any restaurant...

...The signs on the doors of public toilets read "Ladies," "Gentlemen," and "Colored," revealing that both sexes had to share the last of these...

...Lying on the floor of a highway patrol car, Lucy was finally driven away from the bellowing throng...

...The case is a continual reminder of what has and hasn't altered in America— in any region, city, town, or state...

...She was informed that the University's board of trustees had specifically ordered that she should not be assigned a room because "it might endanger the safety or result in the sociological disadvantage of the students...

...therefore, on the morning . . . when she needed money to pay her tuition until the scholarship matter could be straightened out, the chairman of the committee hurriedly withdrew $ 100 from the bank and handed it to [her], so that there would be no question of her having completed registration on time...

...It was learned that when Polly Anne Myers applied to the University, she had been pregnant by a man convicted of burglary...

...She talked about others who were beaten, bombed, and lynched during the struggle for equal rights, and she said she was fortunate that she wasn't harmed...

...The Councils sent questionnaires to candidates in Alabama's next Democratic primary, asking whether they were committed to segregation, and it was understood that the replies would be made public...

...In March, the University trustees found a legal pretext to expel Autherine Lucy...

...She had then taught high school English and Sunday school, and she was eager to earn a degree in library science...

...The number of Councils in Alabama expanded rapidly in the next few weeks...

...The case made headlines all over the world, and it was given detailed coverage in the Soviet press...

...But she remarked on the scarcity of black teachers in the schools she knows, the disadvantages of black students in integrated classrooms, the overwhelming majority of white school administrators and trustees...

...She does not dwell on the past—the case was one chapter in a very full life, and she doesn't want to be defined by it...

...Much of the press depicted Tuscaloosa as a place where blacks and whites enjoyed harmonious relations— until the advent of Autherine Lucy...

...Naturally, it had been hard to approach the University alone, after Polly Anne Myers was excluded...

...Immediately after the Lucy case, the zeal of the segregationists intensified: At a Citizens Council meeting in Montgomery, Attorney General Eugene Cook of Georgia referred to desegregation as "racial suicide...

...some thought the boycott heightened the fury that greeted the desegregation order...

...Tuscaloosa had twice as many whites as blacks, but many of the whites thought of themselves as a minority...

...And that if it were mine to see it through, to give me the courage to go through with it...

...The NAACP in Alabama was shut down for eight years, and some members believed the injunction issued against their organization was a direct consequence of the Lucy case...

...We spoke of the day in 1956 when the mob raced after her up the steps of the library, yelling "Let's kill her...

...Adlai Stevenson said the "situation" merited "the prompt attention of the President," but suggested the topic of segregation should be avoided in the upcoming Presidential campaign...

...on the second day, in a Ford...

...When I inquired whether those days on campus had made her wary of whites or had affected her opinion of human nature, she said no, but it had taught her that "there are some people in all races who may not accept you," and that some blacks did not favor desegregation or the part she played in it...

...And if I were to give my life, to let someone else take over where I left off...

...on the third, in an Oldsmobile...

...even the soft drink machines on campus were emptied or sealed up, so that no one could use a bottle as a weapon...

...Some blamed Governor James Folsom of Alabama because the state National Guard had not been summoned after President Carmichael sent a request through the mayor of Tuscaloosa...

...The University chaplain, who attempted to pacify the rioters, was kneed in the groin...

...A new generation can hardly believe that universities and lunch counters and apartment houses were once closed to their parents...

...Segregationists felt they had won a great victory, but some of their opponents also had a sense of achievement: Autherine Lucy and her lawyers had opened the University to black students, though none actually attended until 1963, when George Wallace "stood in the schoolhouse door" and performed his charade of resistance until he was instructed to step aside on the orders of President Kennedy...

...Since he has been assigned to many parishes, they have moved often...

...Folsom was absent from his office and his staff did not act on the request...

...not only had he "fomented" the crowds, but he had called for the dismissal of President Carmichael...

...Caddell implied that "the actions" of Lucy and her companions had generated the violence that ensued: "All the publicity was calculated to cause rioting and they knew it...

...Segregationists were discovering that black Southerners were ready to defy the status quo...

...They also chanted outside her classroom, "Hey, hey, ho, where in the hell did Autherine go...

...A House resolution was also passed requiring President Carmichael to supply the names of some 200 students (out of7,000) who had signed petitions in support of Autherine Lucy...

...Several University officials would later testify that the mob of about 2,000 seemed ready to commit murder...

...In those days, the state retained detectives to investigate the personal backgrounds of plaintiffs in desegregation suits—in hopes of disqualifying them...

...The mobs that had menaced her had included some undergraduates, but many of the men were rubber workers from the nearby Goodrich plant or employees of a steel foundry...

...If they appeared to be more than solvent, they might possess shady connections...

...The Lucy case was the first occasion when a black student's admission to a Southern university was so savagely opposed...

...The Klan took credit for gasoline-soaked crosses that were set ablaze at and near the University...

...Hence she had to commute to her classes every day from Birmingham, a distance of sixty miles in each direction...

...Autherine Foster has taught in public schools in Texas, Louisiana, and Alabama, and now works as a substitute teacher...

...Outsiders" who came South "to agitate the Negroes" were suspected, therefore, of being Soviet instruments...

...Those who wished to join the Central Alabama Citizens Council, the largest in the state, signed a membership application that asserted, "I pledge myself to help defeat the NAACP, integration, mongrelism, socialism, Communist ideologies, FEPC [the proposed Fair Employment Practices Commission], and one world government...

...He said the NAACP was scheming "to get a Negro elected Vice President, and then to take over the country by assassinating the President...

...When she registered for her courses in February 1956, the Montgomery bus boycott led by Martin Luther King Jr...

...The Supreme Court's 1954 Brown decision, which outlawed segregation in public schools, brought a reaction that revitalized the Ku Klux Klan, and White Citizens Councils were formed in direct response to the Court's ruling...

...She was driven daily from Birmingham by black volunteers: On the first day, she was delivered "by a man who happened to own a Buick...

...Barred at the Schoolhouse Door Autherine Lucy's case mirrored the black experience BY NORA SAYRE In the 1950s, the Democratic ballot in Alabama still bore the slogan WHITE SUPREMACY...

...No other black had ever attended a white school or college in that state...

...While she stayed with her sister in Birmingham, her brother-in-law and his cousin guarded their home with guns because their phone was throbbing with death threats...

...The city's first White Citizens Council was organized right after Autherine Lucy put in an appearance there...

...But soon Lucy was known as "the controversial colored girl" (Newsweek) who had infused a whole city with hatred...

...he recommended that they be convicted of felony if they returned...

...The NAACP provided some lecture dates, and since the 1970s, she has been invited to address several American history classes at the University of Alabama...

...She does not think she was particularly brave— "I can't take any credit because so many other people went through so much"—and she referred to the many times that Arthur Shores's house was dynamited while he worked on one desegregation case after another: "And he just wouldn't be stopped...

...Shores filed their suit in conjunction with Thurgood Marshall, then chief counsel for the NAACP, and Constance Baker Motley...

...Jefferson Bennett, the assistant to the President, and Sarah Healy, Dean of Women, risked their lives in protecting her...

...An extremely private person, she has no love for interviews, but she feels an obligation to share the history that claimed her...

...was two months old...

...Huge fines were imposed on the NAACP when it declined to reveal its membership list to the state authorities...

...In the same year, the city of Birmingham repealed all its segregation laws...

...She continued to expect a more rational and humane world than the one she inhabited...

...She described "segregation within integration": the "isolation" in housing (she lives in an almost entirely black neighborhood), the gulf between black and white churches even though "we say that we worship the same God," the undergraduates who sit with their own races in the lecture halls...

...But the butt of all that hatred did not lose sleep or her appetite...

...Amid yells of "Keep 'Bama white...

...Lucy, a retiring and modest person, has said she was not an activist...

...When she arrived on Monday, her black driver barely escaped injury...

...He then managed to shun the subject until it was necessary to send Federal troops to defend the new black students at the Little Rock Central High School in Arkansas in 1957...

...She laughs freely, sometimes at unexpected moments, and she is quick to challenge a question, though she pauses and grows pensive when she explores her memories...

...In 1952, her friend Polly Anne Myers, who had been prominent in the student chapter of the NAACP at Miles, suggested that they apply to the state university for graduate work in fields that black colleges did not provide...

...She told me she had sat and prayed inside a locked room while she heard the voices outside chanting "Hey, hey, ho...

...The label was appropriate to the Cold War 1950s, of course, but some of the older segregationists still remembered the efforts of the Communist Party to organize black workers in the South during the Great Depression...

...the quiet, diffident individual was the representative of millions whose adversaries had begun to realize that they were confronting a social revolution...

...For me, that event was the Autherine Lucy case of 1956, which I followed closely at the time...

...She was and is a deeply religious person, and it's clear that part of her resilience springs from spirituality...

...That I couldn't stop until I felt that I had gone as far as I could...

...But Autherine Lucy's dossier was impeccable, and she became the sole candidate...

...Since many whites considered blacks unclean, the races rarely ate at the same table, though most white meals were cooked by black hands...

...Columnists censured the University for capitulating to mob rule...

...Leonard Wilson was expelled soon after for the same reason...

...She is glad everyone receives the same education at the University of Alabama—which now has the highest percentage of black students of any of the once-white universities in the South...

...there was no need for Northern agitators to animate them...

...A citizens' committee in Alabama had raised funds" for some of her expenses...

...The NAACP heard that people from other parts of Alabama and even from other states had come to swell the hordes...

...The Alabama House of Representatives passed a resolution to determine whether the NAACP was "directed or controlled by Communists," and Lucy was subpoenaed to appear as the first witness...

...Folsom, who had been regarded as quite enlightened about civil rights—to the extent that some Citizens Council members had demanded his impeachment—then made some highly ambiguous remarks about desegregation...

...Its temporary chairman, Leonard Wilson, a sophomore at the University, told the membership, "We will control every public office from the lowest c o u n t y peanut p o l i t i c i a n to the Governor' s mansion...

...Some other blacks had entered all-white Southern universities without encountering resistance, so neither the University nor Lucy's lawyers had anticipated the tumult at Tuscaloosa...

...I was raised in several states, moving between New York and California and New England, but I knew all too little about lethal racial passions until I read about the experiences of the first black student at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa...

...Racist leaflets were distributed on campus by Robert Chambliss, who would be convicted many years later for the 1963 bombing that killed four young black girls in a Baptist church in Birmingham...

...Such plaintiffs were also apt to lose their jobs with white employers, or to be deprived of their home mortgages at local banks...

...Autherine Lucy, twenty-six, was admitted to the University after a three-year lawsuit sponsored by the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, Inc...

...Some whites surmised that blacks who were not destitute must have acquired money by illicit means...

...She was told to wear her best dresses, to ignore all insults, to hold her head high...

...She never chose to be a public figure, but she seems at ease with the vanished decades...

...on the fourth, "by a man who happened to own a Cadillac...

...Council members— mostly male—often tried to dissociate themselves from the Klan: Many wore neckties, not hoods, and they felt themselves to be of a higher social class than the Klansmen, but a number of them funded the Klan, and some were willing to resort to violence...

...Bomb threats were frequent...

...It was not against state law for blacks to attend the University, which had no written policy that denied admission on racial grounds, but black applicants were always advised to go elsewhere...

...A resolution in the Alabama legislature requested Federal funds to relocate black Alabamians in Northern and Western states, where they "are wanted and can be assimilated...

...She had been "escorted" to the front of the registration line "by anxious university personnel"—who had not foreseen how much that gesture would be resented...

...In retrospect, the Autherine Lucy case and its consequences seem to mirror much of the black experience in this country...

...The New York Times reported, "Race relations in Tuscaloosa had been so happy that, as the Lucy affair was coming to a head, Negroes only gathered to watch and laugh when a fiery cross was burned on the edge of a Negro high school campus...

...Later, when Thurgood Marshall asked University trustee John Caddell in court if Lucy had done "anything unlawful when she came to the University," Caddell replied, "She came in a Cadillac automobile and she had a chauffeur, and walked in a way as to be obnoxious and objectionable and disagreeable...

...The youngest of ten children of a tenant farmer, she had graduated from Miles College, a black Methodist school in Birmingham...

...In Birmingham, a city ordinance forbade black citizens from riding in elevators or taxicabs with whites, or from playing checkers with them...

...At subsequent meetings, State Senator Walter Givhan declared that communists were advocating desegregation "because they know that the South is one of the few places in which pure Anglo-Saxon blood exists...

...I asked Autherine Foster for her thoughts on how life has and has not changed for black Americans...

...Ample Federal troops were on hand, and the University had prepared for weeks for the registration of two black students...

...Others who didn't hire her were not so frank, but she sensed their awareness of the case...

...After a protest rally, they paraded through the neighborhood and vandalized a post office, where they splashed ink on the American flag—a symbol of the Supreme Court and its desegregation ruling...

...In April 1984, I took a bus from Birmingham to Opelika to visit Autherine Lucy Foster, bringing her regards from Arthur Shores, Judge Grooms, and others...

...and the waving of Confederate flags, University President O.C...

...Representative Charles McKay of Talladega said he thought "most white Southerners" would be "glad to cancel out any debts" owed by blacks if they would leave the state...

...One school superintendent said her association with the NAACP made her unacceptable: "To him, I was . . . the infamous Miss Lucy...

...It was stressed that students of both races had been disciplined...

...Local papers, such as The Birmingham Post-Herald, reported that her clothes were too "fashionable," that she was "hustled ahead" of white students waiting in the registration line, and that she paid for her tuition with "a crisp $100 bill...

...Klansmen and Citizens Council members were united in the belief that the NAACP was dominated by communists...

...Bottles were thrown...

...The University excluded her for her "conduct and marital record...

...They have four children...

...She added, "I'm still benefiting, though, if others are benefiting...

...The case was brought as a class-action suit, meaning that other qualified blacks could enter the University in the future...

...Segregationists were often outraged by intimations of black prosperity...

...She recalled, "I asked the Lord to give me the strength—if I must give my life—to give it freely...

...The timing was significant...

...her baby was born six months after her marriage...

...That I felt it was my task to do...

...In the wake of the Brown decision, Federal District Judge Hobart H. Grooms ruled that the University could not disobey the law and that both women had to be enrolled...

...She says she is devoted to her state, delighted to be living there once more, and "proud of Alabama...

...She mentioned the young men and women who do have interracial friendships: "They have found that there can be good blacks and good whites, there can be bad blacks and bad whites...

...Myers, a mettlesome, enterprising young woman, was the initiator...

...Bills were introduced to terminate grants to black colleges such as the Tuskegee Institute if a single black student were allowed to remain at a white state college...

...She still wishes she were a graduate of the University...

...Lucy's carefully chosen wardrobe, the $ 100 bill, and the fact that she once arrived in Tuscaloosa in a Cadillac excited so much hostile comment that Constance Baker Motley compiled a "fact sheet...

...It explained that Lucy had been allotted a scholarship by a New York foundation, but the University had returned the money because she was not yet registered...

...The issue was not the presence of one black woman on a single university campus...

...The publicity the case received probably cost her some jobs in the early 1960s...

...Hey, hey, ho, where in the hell did that nigger go...

...Perhaps there is one event that occurs early in many Americans' lifetimes that educates them about the nature of their country...

...Leonard Wilson had told a large crowd that Lucy deserved "a greeting she would never forget...

...She was refused a room in a dormitory and barred from the dining halls...

...But if we are still appalled by what happened in Tuscaloosa in 1956 and wish to think that no mob could wield such power today, we're forced to witness the most recent furor in response to busing, or the crosses that were burned on someone's lawn last month, last week...

...Yet even though she was expelled, "even though things may not work out as you would have wished," she is heartened by the numbers of black students there and hopes the races will profit from mutual exposure— even though "they are separate...

...Following her expulsion, she married her longtime fiance, Hugh Lawrence Foster, who soon became a Baptist minister...

...But, after praying for guidance, "I decided that it was just something that I must do...

...I asked what had sustained her at the time...

...The Autherine Lucy case became a symbolic battlefield for those who were determined to maintain segregation and those who had resolved to abolish it...

...President Eisenhower, who had been cool to the Brown decision, "deplored" the rioting, said Federal "interference" was undesirable, recommended "moderation," and subsequently remarked, "Let's don't try to think of this as a tremendous fight that is going to separate Americans and get ourselves into a nasty mess...

...Kill her...

...The Supreme Court had also established that the ban on segregation applied to tax-supported colleges and universities...

...She had already left the state, and the hearings did not take place...

...All through the summer of 1955, Lucy's friends in the NAACP advised her on how to conduct herself on campus...

...The charge of collusion could not be proved in court, and Lucy was expelled for "libelous allegations against the Board and the President...

...But she regrets that they belong to separate organizations...

...Her lawyers had filed an affidavit accusing the trustees of conspiring with the mob...

...The next day, she was suspended "for her own protection" by the trustees, In the Alabama Senate, Senator Albert Davis praised the demonstrators and said, "Yesterday was a great day for Alabama...

...One of the few white politicians who displayed a strong reaction was Governor Averell Harriman of New York, who demanded "vigorous" Federal action against those who were preventing Lucy from continuing her education...

...Carmichael was showered with gravel and firecrackers when he tried to address the jeering demonstrators, who had also damaged the vehicles of several black townsmen...

...as she was driven from one class to another...

...some pursued Lucy with shouts of "Let's kill her...

...While she was away over the weekend, though, mobs assembled on the grounds...

...When pressed, he called segregation a local matter, and he suggested that 1965 might be a possible target date "for a gradual settlement of the school racial crisis...

...The windows of Dean Healy's car were shattered...

...But Lucy went through two days of classes without incident, and some students even told her that they wished her well...