Autherine Lucy and the First Breach

February third, nineteen fifty-six. Autherine Lucy enrolled in the graduate Library Science program at the University of Alabama, becoming the first Black person admitted to a white public college or university in the state. She and Pollie Myers had applied together years earlier; the university had admitted them both before realizing they were Black, then tried to exclude them.

Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP fought the case to a federal court order. On her first day of classes, February sixth, a mob of more than a thousand people gathered on campus and pelted the car carrying her to class. Death threats arrived.

The university president's home was stoned. University administrators suspended Lucy within days, citing concern for her safety. They later expelled her on what they described as a technicality.

The riots, the suspension, and the expulsion represented the most violent pro-segregation response to a desegregation order in the years following the Supreme Court's ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. The expulsion effectively ended Lucy's attempt to attend the university.

What makes her story particularly striking in retrospect is its long arc. The university annulled her expulsion in nineteen eighty-eight. In nineteen eighty-nine, Autherine Lucy Foster, as she was then known, re-enrolled as a master's student, and in nineteen ninety-two she graduated alongside her daughter.

In twenty nineteen, the university awarded her an honorary doctorate. In twenty twenty-two, it dedicated a residence hall in her name. In twenty ten, the university renamed the plaza in front of Foster Auditorium, Malone-Hood Plaza, in honor of her and the two students who would walk through those doors seven years after she was forced out.

The clock tower at the center of that plaza bears her name. She died in March twenty twenty-two at ninety-two years old, having lived long enough to see her name on a building at the university that once expelled her.