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The first Black student to enroll at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa will now be honored alone on a campus building, replacing a former Alabama governor and Ku Klux Klan leader.
The university system’s Board of Trustees voted on Friday to reverse course on an initial plan to merge the names of Autherine Lucy Foster, who enrolled in 1956 but was quickly run off campus by racist protesters, and Bibb Graves, a former grand cyclops of the Klan’s chapter in Montgomery, Ala. The proposed “Lucy-Graves Hall” had sparked outrage over the past week among many students, faculty members, and alumni.
During a special board meeting, Judge John H. England Jr., a former trustee who had led the board’s working group on building names, acknowledged that he and other members had been wrong to suggest the hyphenated name.
The group “certainly intended for that paired name to generate educational moments that can help us learn from our complex and rich history,” said England, who is Black, at Friday’s meeting. But the celebration of Foster had been lost in the controversy over Graves, England said.
While Graves was known as a progressive governor in the 1920s and 1930s, and supported educational opportunities for Black people, he also turned a blind eye to violence perpetrated by the Klan and opposed anti-Klan legislation.
Critics slammed the idea of honoring both Foster, now 92, a prominent symbol of racial justice, and Graves, a man who held racist views, on the same building. Ultimately, England, who also has a campus building named for him, agreed. “We’ve heard enough from people whose opinions matter to us — students, faculty, staff — that we can do that in a better way than what we’ve done,” he said.
W. Stancil Starnes, who presides over the board, said the university had decided to use Foster’s birth name, Autherine Lucy — as she was known when she first enrolled — after consulting with Foster’s family. In 1989 the civil-rights pioneer, who had married and become Autherine Lucy Foster, returned to campus to resume her education. She received her master’s degree in 1992.
Alabama’s decision to remove Graves’s name after an outcry contrasts with what’s transpired recently at other Southern flagships, like the University of South Carolina at Columbia and the University of Georgia, where calls to rename buildings that honor racists have not been heeded. South Carolina and Georgia have state laws that restrict public institutions from removing or altering historic buildings or monuments.
Alabama has a similar law, the Alabama Memorial Preservation Act, which bars local governments from renaming or altering “architecturally significant” buildings that are more than 40 years old without approval from a state committee. The law’s definition of “memorial schools” includes public elementary and secondary schools and two-year colleges, but not four-year universities.
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