Alabama State University: Born from Rebellion

Alabama State University is one of the oldest historically Black universities in the United States, and its founding story is one of deliberate defiance. In eighteen sixty-seven, a group of nine formerly enslaved men established the Lincoln Normal School in Marion, Alabama, a small community in Perry County about eighty miles west of Montgomery. They pooled their own money, chose their own teachers, and built a school for Black students in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, before most white Alabamians would even acknowledge that Black Alabamians had the right to learn.

The school moved to Montgomery in eighteen eighty-seven at the invitation of the state government, which by then wanted some formal control over Black education and offered land and modest funding. The institution became a state normal school, then Alabama State College, and finally Alabama State University in nineteen sixty-nine. Throughout, it maintained a mission of training Black teachers for Alabama's segregated schools, and for decades it was the only institution in the state where Black students could earn teaching credentials.

In the civil rights era, Alabama State became a flashpoint. On March first, nineteen sixty, thirty-five students staged a sit-in at the snack bar inside the Montgomery County Courthouse, one of the first organized sit-ins in Alabama. Governor John Patterson demanded the university expel the student leaders. President H. Councill Trenholm, under enormous pressure, complied and expelled nine students, a decision that haunted the institution. Those students were not reinstated by official action until two thousand ten, fifty years later.

The university today enrolls roughly four thousand students in Montgomery, a living continuation of those nine men who decided in eighteen sixty-six that they would not wait for permission to learn.