University of West Alabama and the Angel of the Stockade

In the small Black Belt city of Livingston, in Sumter County in the far west of Alabama, stands one of the state's oldest institutions of higher education, a school with a history shaped by the extraordinary career of one of Alabama's most consequential women.

The school was chartered in eighteen thirty-five as Livingston Female Academy, established by Scots-Irish Presbyterians as a church-supported institution for young women in the antebellum South. It admitted its first students in eighteen thirty-nine, making it one of the earliest colleges for women west of Georgia. The Civil War and Reconstruction nearly closed it, but it reopened and survived.

In eighteen eighty-one, Julia Strudwick Tutwiler arrived as co-principal. Tutwiler had studied in Germany, spoke multiple languages, and brought to Livingston a relentless energy for reform. She lobbied the state legislature to fund teacher training at the school, securing what is believed to be the first state appropriation in Alabama history made exclusively for the education of women. The first normal school diplomas were granted in eighteen eighty-six. By eighteen ninety-one she was the institution's sole principal, effectively its president, the first woman to hold that role at any state-supported school in Alabama.

But Tutwiler's ambitions extended far beyond her campus. She became known throughout Alabama as the Angel of the Stockade for her prison reform work. She visited penitentiaries on horseback, documented conditions, and lobbied relentlessly for change. Her campaigns resulted in separate women's prisons, the creation of Alabama's first juvenile reform school for boys, Sunday and night schools inside prisons, and sustained pressure to end the convict-lease system, the practice of renting prisoners, overwhelmingly Black men, to companies for mine and factory work.

The school she led is now the University of West Alabama, still serving students in Livingston. Julia Tutwiler Hall at the University of Alabama and the Julia S. Tutwiler Prison for Women both bear her name, a complicated honor for a woman who spent her life fighting for the people inside those walls.