Honoring Black Pioneers in Higher Education: Campus Tours as Memory Work
Meredith M. Bagley, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA & RESEARCH FELLOW, TOURISM RESET
For decades she was absent, nearly erased, a topic so taboo the official record barely registers her. For a period she was reclaimed, but cautiously, in careful moments. Most recently she was the site of reckoning, resistance, and (eventually) re-naming. And now she is gone again, though perhaps on her own terms for once. Who is this shifting subject, steadfast if in the shadows? Dr. Autherine Juanita Lucy Foster, the first Black student to enroll at The University of Alabama (UA). Her tumultuous 1956 experience was finally, fitfully, honored with a building name in 2022 and then Dr. Foster died within days of the dedication. In the area of university and college campus tourism, we are entering a period of time when desegregation pioneers are aging, and dying, presenting race-conscious tourism and public memory work with a compelling set of questions.
An institution can erase a body quite easily, it turns out. Autherine Lucy spent four years in litigation fighting for her initial admission to UA to be upheld, but it is clear that the white student body, faculty, and staff at Alabama were barely aware of her. Secrecy and suppression play into white-dominated institution’s hands, and thus when Autherine arrived for classes on Friday, February 3, 1956, despite the massive racial hierarchy baked into Alabama culture, she walked past a relatively meager crowd of rubberneckers who observed her entry to Smith Hall with no meaningful obstruction.
Lucy’s body was under significantly more danger on Monday, February 6, 1956 when organized mob action by local KKK members (along with some willing UA students) held Lucy captive inside the education college for nearly four hours until her narrow escape via police cruiser. Legal wrangling about her experience led to the UA Board of Trustees expelling her later that month.
Tuscaloosa News coverage of the mobs that blocked Lucy’s enrollment in 1956 – in the same building now named for her!
After this harrowing day in the glare of violent racism, Lucy was made invisible again, this time through UA’s concerted avoidance of the debacle and the successful enrollment of Vivian Malone and James Hood seven years later. UA becomes known merely as the site of Gov. Wallace’s pugnacious attempt to block the schoolhouse door, a mere scene on which national politics unfolds. UA’s active refusal of Lucy’s arrival is rarely, if ever, mentioned. She was, for years, the forgotten predecessor.
To be clear, Black residents of Alabama knew of Autherine’s heroism. Her eventual return to the state, and her long career as an elementary teacher, enabled regular recognition. Her adult daughters told me in 2017 that they routinely used their mom’s historic role to impress teachers, peers, or even get out of homework assignments. Black faculty and staff at UA worked steadily to curate her memory, endowing a scholarship in her name.
I enter this story, humbly, at an auspicious time for Autherine’s memory and presence on campus. It was fall of 2010, and as a newly hired (white) [i] assistant professor of rhetoric, teaching classes on social change, I was thrilled to attend the Foster Auditorium rededication that fall. In restoring the building, UA had also built the Hood-Malone Plaza at its front entrance, on which stood the new Autherine Lucy Clocktower – together these edifices were the first significant, material public memory sites focused on discrimination at UA. I knew of Autherine’s story from faculty colleagues and read with great interest the plaque on the clocktower’s north side about her experience. However, I found it – to be polite – lacking.
UA’s effort at the clocktower, like so many other Predominantly White Institutions (PWI’s) that tell their desegregation stories, minimizes and effaces the Black body for the comfort of the white visitor. In our case, Autherine’s experience is aggressively euphemized as “significant unrest on campus” and the embossed images are of a smiling, optimistic young woman. Her decision to return to UA in the 1980s and complete a Master’s in education gives UA the perfect dodge to the violence of 1956: she is positioned as forgiving (white) UA, absolving us of our sins, another proud alumna.
View of Autherine Lucy clocktower, dedicated in 2010 at Foster Auditorium. Lucy did not interact with Gov. Wallace or Foster Aud in her time at UA, though her initial public memory site is located here.
In the years since, I’m proud to be part of many faculty, staff, students – Black and white – who have worked steadily and successfully to bring Lucy’s story – and her body – into the fore of UA’s public memory. Motivated by the clocktower language, I developed a walking tour of campus focused on Lucy’s experience (she never went to Foster Aud, for example). Over the years this has grown to an ambulatory discussion of public memory and the ways PWI institutions tell their stories. I’ve lead over 100 tours, bringing students, faculty, staff, alumni, and occasionally administrative big-shots, to the spaces in which Autherine walked, ran, hunkered down, and hid during her 1956 enrollment.
The signature moment of my tour is a visit to the semi-underground tunnel connecting the education buildings, a dark and dank space through which Autherine was moved during the siege of Feb 6, 1956. The space tells its own story – you feel trapped, uncomfortable, nervous, less than human. I do more to monitor BIPOC student stress levels than to push white students into realizations of life in the Jim Crow South. We do not stay long; it is not necessary. We leave out a steep stairway, bounded by shrubbery, scrabbling up to fresh air – the message hits home.
Efforts like mine, along with Dr. Hilary Green’s tremendous Hallowed Grounds campus tour, have pushed and prodded UA to more material acts of recognition for Autherine. In 2017 we dedicated a historical marker at the education college, detailing her experiences more directly, and an honorary doctorate in spring 2019 put Autherine before an even larger audience. Watching Black students line up to meet her, weeping with admiration, at these events reminded me how Black heroes literally buoy our students in irreplaceable ways.
The author standing before the historical marker (installed 2017) about Lucy’s experience at the education building now bearing her name.
Then we come to the racial reckoning of summer 2020 when violence to Black bodies reached undeniable levels. Within weeks of George Floyd’s murder, UA removed a giant boulder honoring Confederate soldiers from the center of campus. By August the Board of Trustees approved a special task force to assess campus building names – after years of calls for such action – and before winter break initial un-naming and re-naming’s are announced.[ii] Rumors swirled that finally – finally! - Autherine would get a building.
Yet, once again, Black women were told to be satisfied with less. On Feb 3, 2022, a day on which UA now regularly sends campus-wide emails honoring Autherine’s bravery, the task force announced that the main education building, Graves Hall, would be renamed Lucy-Graves. A shared name, a “balance” of recognition - Autherine asked to share the building with a man incontrovertibly associated with the mobs that sought her assassination. Outrage flowed, swift and unrelenting. But Autherine? As gracious as a finishing school valedictorian. I was immediately reminded what her daughters told me at the historical marker ceremony: “We love when UA honors mama;” they said, “they never over-promise and never under-deliver.”
This time, Lucy’s mob won out. One week later, breaking historical precedent, the UA Board of Trustees reconvened, and the chair of the building names task force reported that his team now unanimously recommended that the building be named Autherine Lucy Hall. Period. The vote was prompt and perfunctory – the re-named building was re-named once again.
At the building ceremony, Feb 28, 2022, Autherine was regal and charming in her red plaid suit, black hat, a gleam in her eye. We craned our necks to see her, and we were all charmed to be claimed as family in her remarks. Autherine was older, wheelchair-bound, but also seemingly at ease, perhaps finally due to a fitting honor? She sat squarely in a place of honor, having triumphed over hatred, violence, and botched bureaucracy. The voice of conscience, this time, came from a Black student speaker (too many prior ceremonies featured too many white voices) who appropriated Wallace’s 1963 rhetoric to assert that Lucy Hall would stand for “education today, education tomorrow, education forever.”
Dr. Foster at the building naming ceremony, Feb 28 2022. She died three days later.
Three days later, Dr. Autherine Juanita Lucy Foster left this earth for her heavenly realm. I was giving a tour that morning, updating my usual script to encompass the fresh events of Lucy Hall, when a cellphone buzzed with the news. Immediately, we all looked up at the freshly sand-blasted letters of her name, glowing in the morning sunshine, as if her spirit paused there on its journey skyward. I was not eager for her passing, but I could not imagine a more affirming place to be when it happened. For a dozen years I spoke of a body I never met, never touched, never connected to. Perhaps all those years I was speaking of her soul and spirit.
This February we won’t have sweet Autherine among us to honor, to apologize to (though no official UA administrator has said these words, to my knowledge), to fete. How does her death alter our work of memory, activism, reckoning and recognition?
I suspect our best hope are the students, as always. The newest publication on UA’s campus, entirely student conceived and executed, is an all-Black culture and politics magazine titled 1956. Dr. Autherine Juanita Lucy Foster may be gone, but our collective and varied efforts have successfully, finally, fully brought her to our campus forever. Autherine herself is now free to go.
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Meredith M. Bagley is an Associate Professor of Communication Studies at The University of Alabama. She teaches and writes in the area of rhetoric, social change, public memory, and sport. She is current guest editor for a two-part special forum on public memory in higher education for the journal Critical Cultural/Communication Studies, due out in March and June 2023. For twelve years she led a walking tour of UA campus focused on Autherine’s experiences and public memory tributes. Now a resident of West Hartford, CT, Dr. Bagley visited Autherine’s grave site before moving away.
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[i] In this post I capitalize Black as a coherent identity who share common experiences both cultural and discriminatory. I do not capitalize white for reasoning: white communities are not figured as being shaped by their race in homogenizing ways, nor discriminatory ones. This choice is in line with a 2020 decision by the Associated Press style guide, but I openly note that other experts and style resources differ. Notably, the MacArthur Foundation project on race, grammar and equity takes an oppsosite stance. For more reading on this subject, see the AP site (https://blog.ap.org/announcements/why-we-will-lowercase-white ) and the MacArthur site (https://www.macfound.org/press/perspectives/capitalizing-black-and-white-grammatical-justice-and-equity).
[ii] The author uses “un-naming” for buildings whose problematic namesakes were removed but no new namesake applied. For example, UA’s Morgan Hall went to English Hall. Other scholars have labeled this a “generic” name. In my tours I’ve kept the “un-naming” verbiage, while nontraditional grammar, to bring my participants’ attention to the decisions of these powerful task force members, and to open the question of who might one day “earn” a build name on campus.