William Hooper Councill and the School He Raised

In eighteen sixty-seven, two years after the end of the Civil War, a man who had been born enslaved in North Carolina began teaching school in northern Alabama. His name was William Hooper Councill. He had escaped to Union lines during the war, and when it ended he started teaching freedpeople, becoming by some accounts the first person to hold a school for Black students outside a city in northern Alabama.

Councill was a politically active man. He used connections within the Democratic Party, which then controlled Alabama politics, to gain legislative approval for a state normal school for Black students. The institution he secured opened on May first, eighteen seventy-five, in Huntsville, with sixty-one students. Councill served as its principal and then its president for thirty-two years, until his death in nineteen oh nine. The school eventually became Alabama Agricultural and Mechanical University.

What Councill built was substantial but not without contradiction. He competed with Booker T. Washington for philanthropic support and, like Washington, operated within the constraints of what white Alabama politicians would permit. He was admitted to practice before the Alabama Supreme Court in eighteen eighty-three, worked as an assistant clerk in the Alabama legislature during Reconstruction, and published educational and historical writing, including a volume called Lamp of Wisdom in eighteen ninety-eight.

It was students from the university he built who, in nineteen sixty-two, sat down at lunch counters in downtown Huntsville and would not leave until the city agreed to integrate them. The institution survived him, and the institution did the work he could not do in his own time.