The first black student at the University of Alabama
Autherine Lucy Foster 1929-2022
Autherine Lucy Foster, who has died aged 92, didn’t set out to become a campaigner, said The New York Times. The child of Alabama sharecroppers, she was a shy, reserved person. But having always excelled academically, she was keen to get a good education and so, in 1952, her friend Pollie Anne Myers suggested they both apply for the University of Alabama – the state’s flagship institution. The college was all white; they were both black. “I thought she was joking at first, I really did,” Lucy Foster recalled.
In September 1952, they were accepted. But a few days later, officials realised their skin colour and told them they weren’t welcome after all. So began a long legal battle, led by Thurgood
Marshall and other civil rights lawyers. In 1954, the supreme court ruled in one of Marshall’s other cases that segregation in public education was unconstitutional. Thanks to Brown v. the Board of Education, Lucy and Myers were able to win their case in the district court. At that point, the university hired private investigators who discovered that Myers had been pregnant when she applied, in breach of the college’s moral code. So it was that Lucy had to take up her place alone. She was not allowed to eat or live on campus, but in February 1956, she started classes. She lasted three days: when news of her presence got around, there were riots and she was pursued by a mob. She was suspended, ostensibly for her own safety, and then expelled – for slandering the university by claiming it had conspired with the rioters.
After that, she married future Baptist minister Hugh Lawrence Foster, and faded from the civil rights scene. It was another seven years before any more black students were admitted; and it wasn’t until 1988 that Lucy Foster’s expulsion was cancelled. She resumed her studies and graduated in 1992, at the same time as her daughter. A plaque was unveiled in her honour then, and this year, a campus building was named after her. It had previously been named after an Alabama governor who’d been a leader of the KKK.