In Touch With A Woman Named Lucy
By Betty Miller Buttram
Contributing Writer, FWIS
On February 1, 1956, a courageous young African American woman walked through the doors of a southern college as an officially enrolled graduate school student at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. It had been a three-year journey through the court system to get to that day, and on February 6, the young woman was expelled from the university.
Autherine Juanita Lucy was born on October 5, 1929, in Shiloh, Marengo County, Alabama. She died on March 2, 2022, at the age of 92.
Lucy was the last of 10 children of Milton Cornelius Lucy and Minnie Maud Hosea. The family owned and farmed 110 acres, and Lucy’s father did blacksmithing, made baskets and axe handles to supplement the family’s income. Lucy attended Linden Academy in Marengo County during the final two years of high school. After graduating, she attended Selma University and received a two-year teaching certificate. However, she was unable to get a job because the state had recently declared that a four-year degree for a full-time teaching position was required. This requirement did not deter Lucy from her goal of teaching. She attended Miles College in Birmingham in 1949 and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in English in 1952.
Pollie Anne Myers, a civil rights activist with the NAACP, was a friend of Lucy. They had met in a public speaking class at Miles. Myers was about to enroll in graduate school at the University of Alabama and contacted and encouraged Lucy to do the same. Lucy reluctantly went along with the idea and enrolled in the Master of Education program. Myers and Lucy requested and received admission forms in early September, applied, and were accepted by September 13. They received dorm assignments after sending in their five-dollar deposits. The admissions officials at the university had no idea that they were black. In anticipation of their certain rejection of their enrollment, which did occur on September 19, Myers and Lucy had retained a lawyer working for the NAACP. When the two black graduate students appeared for the first time at the Admissions Office, they were told by the Dean of Admissions that they could not be enrolled and tried to refund their deposits. Supported by the NAACP, Myers and Lucy charged the University with racial discrimination in a court case that took almost three years to resolve.
While she was on that three-year court journey, Lucy took a position teaching English at Conway Vocational High School in Carthage, Mississippi, and as a secretary at an insurance company. In May 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court, in the Brown vs. Board of Education, made a landmark decision that ruled that U.S. state laws establishing racial segregation in public schools were unconstitutional. The University of Alabama was a public college, and it became clear to the NAACP that Myers/Lucy case would be the first test.
The University of Alabama got busy and hired private investigators to probe into Myers and Lucy’s backgrounds. The University Board of Trustees found that Myers had been pregnant but not married before she applied for admission and used that fact to deny her admission but confirmed Lucy’s admission. Lucy found herself facing the prospect of her journey without Myers.
On that February day in 1956, Lucy was denied a room in the dormitory, but she found room and board off campus. Her first day of classes on February 3 was a success; but that night and the following evening (Friday and Saturday), groups of agitated white university students began marching and speaking on campus. On February 4, her second day of classes passed without notable incident. However, on Monday, February 6, 1956, riots broke out on the campus and a mob of more than a thousand pelted the car in which the Dean of Women drove Lucy between classes. At the end of her second class, Lucy had to wait for more than two hours for a way to safely leave the campus. She was finally sped away in a patrol car while she laid hidden in the back seat. Threats were made against her life and the University president’s home stoned. On the evening of February 6, the University of Alabama’s Board of Trustees voted to exclude Lucy from the university for her own safety.
Lucy and the NAACP filed contempt-of court charges against the trustees and president of the University; against the dean of women for barring Lucy from the dining hall and dormitories; against four other men not connected to the University for participating in the riots; and for conspiring with the mob to prevent Lucy from attending classes. On February 29, the Federal Court in Birmingham ordered that Lucy be reinstated and that the University must take adequate measure to protect her. The University trustees then expelled her permanently on a hastily contrived technicality (for her part in the conspiracy charges). The University used the court case as a justification for her permanent expulsion claiming that Lucy had slandered the University, and they could not have her as a student. The NAACP, feeling that further legal action was pointless, did not contest this decision. Lucy yielded to the NAACP decision.
On April 22, 1956, Lucy married Hugh Lawrence Foster, a divinity student at Bishop College in Tyler, Texas, whom she had known from Miles College. She moved with him to Texas, and they had four children. Lucy made a few speeches at NAACP events in Texas and Philadelphia, but she eventually disappeared from the public eye. Lucy and her family lived in various cities in Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas and then moved back to Alabama in 1974 when her husband accepted the position of pastor of the New Zion Baptist Church in Bessemer, Jefferson County, Alabama. Lucy obtained a position in the Birmingham school system.
In April 1988, the University of Alabama’s board of trustees voted to overturn its expulsion of Lucy, and she enrolled and received her master’s degree in Education on May 9, 1992. The university named an endowed scholarship in her honor and placed her portrait in the Ferguson Center on campus. The inscription on her portrait reads, “Her initiative and courage won the right for students of all races to attend the University.” On May 4, 2019, the University of Alabama awarded Autherine Lucy Foster an honorary doctorate.
Two of Lucy’s four children eventually attended the University of Alabama. Her great-niece, Nikema Natassha Williams, is a member of the U.S. House of Representatives serving Georgia’s 5th District. The same District the late John Lewis represented. Autherine Juanita Lucy Foster was also a sister of the Zeta Phi Beta sorority.