First Black student to enroll at the University of Alabama
Autherine Lucy Foster, who faced racist mobs and death threats as the first Black student to attend the University of Alabama, and who was suspended and ultimately expelled by a school board that was unable or unwilling to ensure her safety, died Wednesday at 92.
Her death was announced by the University of Alabama and by her daughter Angela Foster Dickerson. Additional details were not immediately available.
Although she was chased from campus after only three days of classes, Foster’s 1956 enrollment at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa was a symbolic milestone in the civil rights movement, occurring at what was then an all-White citadel of the segregated South.
The Supreme Court had ruled against “separate but equal” public school facilities two years earlier in Brown v. Board of Education, and Foster — an Alabamian — had been waiting for four years to take graduate education courses at what she considered the best school in the state.
“If I graduated from the University of Alabama, I would have had people coming and calling me for a job,” she told the New York Times decades later. “I did expect to find isolation here. I thought I could survive that. But I did not expect it to go as far as it did.”
Foster, a shy graduate student who was then known as Autherine Lucy, was pelted by rotten eggs and ultimately forced to flee campus in a highway patrol car, instructed to lie on the floor of the back seat.
Students, local residents and members of the Ku Klux Klan protested her enrollment by burning crosses and smashing cars that were driven by Black drivers, with some demonstrators chanting “Keep Bama White” and “To hell with Autherine.”
“I asked the Lord to give me the strength – if I must give my life — to give it freely,” she later recalled, according to
Nora Sayre’s book “Previous Convictions.” Journalists at the time took note of her resolve, with New York Post columnist Murray Kempton writing, “What is this extraordinary resource of this otherwise unhappy country that it breeds such dignity in its victims?”
In response to the violence, the university’s trustees voted to suspend Foster “until further notice.” Her legal team, including Thurgood Marshall of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, filed a lawsuit accusing the university of conspiring with the rioters. A federal judge ordered the school to reinstate Foster, but the trustees voted to expel her permanently, saying she had falsely defamed the school with her legal complaint.
The confrontation signaled the beginning of a violent new stage in the movement to register Black students in previously allWhite schools across the South and riveted the nation’s attention even as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. led a bus boycott in Montgomery.
Autherine Juanita Lucy was born in Shiloh, Ala., on Oct. 5, 1929. By most accounts, she was the youngest of 10 children and grew up on a farm owned by her parents. Foster graduated from high school in Linden, Ala., and studied at Selma University and Miles College, a historically Black school in Fairfield, Ala., where she received a bachelor’s degree in English in 1952.
Foster married Hugh Foster, a minister, in 1956, shortly after she was expelled from the university.
She had four children, but information on survivors was not immediately available.