Alabama State University and the Sit-Ins of 1960
Near Montgomery, Alabama
Alabama State University, founded in eighteen seventy-four as one of the first state-supported institutions for Black students in the South, sits on the south side of downtown Montgomery. Its faculty and students were central to the civil rights movement in ways that have not always been adequately recognized.
Jo Ann Robinson, whose Women's Political Council organized the logistics of the bus boycott, was an English professor here. The boycott's carpool organization was coordinated partly through campus networks. The state legislature cut the university's funding as retaliation and threatened to revoke its accreditation.
On March first, nineteen sixty, more than one thousand students marched from the Alabama State campus to the state capitol and back, joining the sit-in wave that was then spreading across the South following the Greensboro, North Carolina lunch counter sit-ins of February. Governor John Patterson demanded the university president expel the students who had organized the protest.
Nine students identified as leaders were expelled. Twenty more were suspended. Within days, more than one thousand students pledged a mass strike and threatened to withdraw. Thirty-seven students were subsequently arrested during related demonstrations.
In two thousand ten, on the fiftieth anniversary of the sit-ins, Alabama State University's president formally reinstated the nine expelled students, criticized Governor Patterson's intervention as arbitrary and illegal, and praised their actions as an important moment in civil rights history. The university lost its accreditation in nineteen sixty-one under state pressure and regained it in nineteen sixty-six.
