“What happened on that day in those doors is a matter of great consequence in the last century of American history,” E. Culpepper Clark said in a presentation to The University of Alabama’s Blackburn Institute on Saturday, Feb. 23.
Clark, author of “The Schoolhouse Door: Segregation’s Last Stand at the University of Alabama,” was referring to the two doors mounted on a platform to his far left, their white paint dulled gray and cracking with age. Fifty years have passed since they played a feature role in former Alabama Gov. George Wallace’s ceremonious “stand in the schoolhouse door” to block James Hood and Vivian Malone Jones’s integration of the University on June 11, 1963.
“No one can think about the Civil Rights Movement without thinking about that dramatic moment,” Clark said.
Nor can one comprehend fully the moment’s significance 50 years later without listening to and learning from the people whose efforts made it happen.
“I wasn’t an activist by any means – I wasn’t sitting in at restaurants or anything like that,” Wali Ali Meyer said. “I was just looking to follow truth wherever I could in my own inner life.”
Meyer followed his truth directly into an active role in the University’s integration. As the editor of The Crimson White his junior year, Meyer, who then went by Melvin, published an editorial written by editorial assistant Robbie Roberts denouncing the University of Mississippi’s efforts to block James Meredith’s enrollment. Printed at the top of page 4 in the Sep. 27, 1962 issue of The Crimson White, the anonymous column said, “Every time the rights of one citizen anywhere are harmed, every citizen is harmed … We lost something American in Oxford this week, and every American citizen is the less for it.”
“I liked the way it was written, and it seemed to coincide with my moral sense of what was right,” Meyer said. “It was something I was willing to take a stand for.”
Following the editorial’s publication, The Crimson White received “hundreds and hundreds of totally racist hate letters to the editor,” most including remarks attacking Meyer’s Jewish heritage. But even after Klu Klux Klan members burned a cross on the lawn of his fraternity house, Meyer said he never seriously feared for his own safety.
“When the heat came down, I didn’t really mind, but it inconvenienced my friends and family,” Meyer said.
University administration arranged for armed guards to accompany Meyer throughout the entirety of his day, and the University archives contain several envelopes stuffed to the brim with daily reports from October through December 1962 conveying just how thoroughly the agents inserted themselves into Meyer’s regular routine.
One report, dated Saturday, Oct. 10, 1962, and filed by an Operative Number 24, reads, “Operatives arrived at Subject’s house at 10 p.m. We went upstairs and got Subject at 12 p.m. We, all, left Subject’s house at 12:35 p.m. and went to the game. We took Subject and his friends in at Gate #9. They sat in the student section at about the 40-yard line. Everything went well during the game.”
In another report from Dec. 10, also filed by Operative Number 24, Meyer “had LaBrenda [LuQuire] all hugged up” as he left his apartment with friends at 9:55 p.m.
Meyer said he didn’t fully realize the significance of the integration effort until some time later when he was back home in Starkville, Miss., picking up his mother’s laundry from the black washerwoman across town.
“I didn’t know this lady at all, and she came running to me outside of the house with tears in her eyes saying, ‘Mr. Melvin, Mr. Melvin, they’re going to let Mr. Meredith back in. They’re letting him back in.’
“Everybody had this idea that black people were content in their current position, and that it was all the liberals and the radicals that were causing trouble and stirring up stuff that didn’t need to be stirred up. But for the first time, I really realized that these were people just like myself, and there was the sad, powerful realization that they had these inner aspirations that they were being forced to hide from other people.”
When Art Dunning arrived on campus in 1966, his aspirations were clear.
“I had two goals in coming to the University,” he said. “One, I was here to study anthropology. Two, I was here to make this a state university. I was going to make this truly The University of Alabama.”
Dunning, a professor and senior research fellow in the University’s Education Policy Center and co-chair of the committee heading this year’s Through the Doors integration anniversary program, served two years in Taiwan with the U.S. Air Force before matriculating to the University. Dunning said his years of military service drastically shaped his perspectives on race, education and politics.
“The Jim Crowe caste system of the American South at that time, for people like me it was suffocating, absolutely suffocating. My time in Taiwan gave me a chance to feel what it was like to not have my every movement circumscribed by my racial identity,” Dunning said. “I identified myself as an American because that’s what I was called and how I was known abroad.
“When I came back to Alabama and the South, I recognized and embraced – I reclaimed – my Southern heritage. When I left, Southern was white. When I came back, Southern meant people of all stripes.”
Dunning was one of what he approximates to be 10-15 African-American students at the University during his undergraduate years.
“My very first day of class, I walked into the classroom and immediately six to eight people got up from their chairs and walked out,” he said. “I was a junior here before anyone here even sat in the chair directly next to me.”
So Dunning went to them.
In the 1966 fall semester, Dunning and others approached Frank Rose, the University’s president at the time, with a list of suggestions to make campus more inviting for black students. When naysayers argued against integration of Crimson Tide athletic squads with claims that black football players would not possess enough intelligence to succeed as students as well as athletes, Dunning and four of his friends walked on at Paul “Bear” Bryant’s spring practices.
Like Dunning, Elayne Savage wasn’t on campus in June 1963. Though she had graduated from the University and moved away from Tuscaloosa before Wallace’s infamous stand, she directly contributed to June 11’s historical relevance – as well as the day’s nonviolent progression and conclusion.
Clark said “because of John L. Blackburn’s efforts, our students were the most prepared students for integration of any campus in the South.”
In the months leading up to the University’s integration, Blackburn, the Dean of Men at the time and the namesake of the Institute mentioned above, began recruiting 30-odd student leaders to develop and coordinate grassroots-level, interpersonal campaigns to ensure the campus’s peaceful transition.
Savage, known as Layni Raskin during her time at the University, was one of Blackburn’s student diplomats.
“So much of that is a blur; it was all so long ago, and I wasn’t as deeply involved as some other people,” Savage said. “But what impresses me to this day is how incredibly detail-based everything was. It’s just amazing to me that they could get so well-organized and strategize so beautifully.”
For Savage, involvement with Blackburn’s effort played as significant a role in her own integration to the campus community as it did that of Hood and Malone Jones.
“I was such a mess when I arrived on campus in 1959. Just a few years earlier my mom and grandmother had been killed in a plane crash. Then my dad remarried, and my senior year of high school I moved across the country. I was still pretty dazed from it all when I came to Tuscaloosa,” Savage wrote in notes for a 2010 Blackburn tribute event speech. “Mostly I felt ‘different’ from my peers. I doubt if Dean Blackburn was aware of my history. I didn’t talk about it to folks. Yet he intuitively was understanding, caring, kind and patient. I felt accepted and validated by him at a time when I really needed some kindnesses. And I’m grateful.”
Like Meyer, Savage’s involvement in the integration effort raised her profile with the Klan, prompting scare tactics like the breaking and entering of her sorority house.
“It was kind of a scary time. We weren’t afraid of Wallace. He was huffing and puffing, but we knew he was going to back down. But you had that whole element of the unknown,” Savage said. “Nobody knew exactly what we were getting ourselves into. We couldn’t know what was going to happen, it was such uncharted territory.”
Fifty years later, Meyer feels unfilled space still exists in which people can and should move toward more compassion and understanding.
“We’ve made and we are making progress, but we all still cope on some inner level with these artificial boundaries,” he said. “We need to eat together, pray together. We need to dance together. We need to talk to each other.”
Leading in today’s Crimson White:
Freshman Hakansson breaks school record in men’s weight throw
Local six-piece band’s album to include graphic novel
Senior Alexis Paine breaks 3rd UA record in women’s pole vault
