University of West Alabama: Julia Tutwiler's Quiet Revolution

Out here in Livingston, the seat of Sumter County deep in Alabama's Black Belt, stands a campus that has quietly shaped this state for nearly two centuries. The University of West Alabama traces its roots to eighteen thirty-five, when the Alabama legislature chartered a church-related female academy here. The school admitted its first students in eighteen thirty-nine, founded largely by Scots-Irish Presbyterians who controlled most of the early board of trustees.

For much of its first half-century, the institution struggled through the Civil War and Reconstruction and reopened on the other side barely intact. Then came Julia Strudwick Tutwiler.

Tutwiler arrived as co-principal of the Livingston Female Academy in eighteen eighty-one and stayed nearly thirty years. She was already remarkable. Born in Tuscaloosa in eighteen forty-one, she had studied in Germany at a time when American women rarely pursued graduate education abroad. What she brought back was conviction: that women deserved real instruction, that prisoners deserved humane treatment, and that Alabama could do better on both counts.

At Livingston she won a small state appropriation in eighteen eighty-three to establish formal teacher training, one of the first normal school programs for women in the South. Elsewhere she lobbied the legislature for decades to open the University of Alabama to women, a battle she finally won in eighteen ninety-two. She campaigned for separate prison facilities for women, Sunday and night schools inside Alabama jails, and the creation of the South's first juvenile reform school for white boys. The state called her the angel of the prisons.

She also wrote poetry. A verse she composed in Germany in eighteen seventy-three, a lyric tribute to her home state, was eventually set to music and adopted as Alabama's official state song. It remains so today.

Tutwiler served as the institution's first and only woman president before stepping down in nineteen ten. The school she helped build has gone through several names across the decades, becoming the University of West Alabama in nineteen ninety-five. It still stands in Livingston, still training teachers, still carrying the imprint of the woman who saw this small Black Belt town as a place to prove what education could do.