Autherine Lucy Foster, who faced racist mobs and death threats as the first Black student to attend the University of Alabama, and who was suspended and ultimately expelled by a school board that was unable or unwilling to ensure her safety, died Wednesday at 92.
Her death was announced by the University of Alabama and by her daughter Angela Foster Dickerson. Additional details were not immediately available.
Although she was chased from campus after only three days of classes, Foster's 1956 enrollment at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa was a symbolic milestone in the civil rights movement, occurring at what was then an all-White citadel of the segregated South.
The Supreme Court had ruled against "separate but equal" public school facilities two years earlier in Brown v. Board of Education, and Foster - an Alabamian - had been waiting for four years to take graduate education courses at what she considered the best school in the state.
"If I graduated from the University of Alabama, I would have had people coming and calling me for a job," she told the New York Times decades later. "I did expect to find isolation here. I thought I could survive that. But I did not expect it to go as far as it did."
Foster, a shy graduate student who was then known as Autherine Lucy, was pelted by rotten eggs and ultimately forced to flee campus in a highway patrol car, instructed to lie on the floor of the back seat.
Students, local residents and members of the Ku Klux Klan protested her enrollment by burning crosses and smashing cars that were driven by Black drivers, with some demonstrators chanting "Keep Bama White" and "To hell with Autherine."
"I asked the Lord to give me the strength - if I must give my life - to give it freely," she later recalled, according to Nora Sayre's book "Previous Convictions." Journalists at the time took note of her resolve, with New York Post columnist Murray Kempton writing, "What is this extraordinary resource of this otherwise unhappy country that it breeds such dignity in its victims?"
In response to the violence, the university's trustees voted to suspend Foster "until further notice." Her legal team, including Thurgood Marshall of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, filed a lawsuit accusing the university of conspiring with the rioters. A federal judge ordered the school to reinstate Foster, but the trustees voted to expel her permanently, saying she had falsely defamed the school with her legal complaint.
"I am shocked by this turn of events," Foster said at the time. "I've done all that I can. I was looking forward to returning to school. At this point there is nothing more I can say."
The confrontation signaled the beginning of a violent new stage in the movement to register Black students in previously all-White schools across the South and riveted the nation's attention even as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. led a bus boycott in Montgomery.
In a sermon after Foster was expelled, King condemned reports that there was "peace" on the Tuscaloosa campus, calling it "peace that had been purchased at the price of allowing mobocracy to reign supreme over democracy."
In 1957, the Little Rock Nine in Arkansas later became national emblems of desegregation, as did James Meredith in 1962, when he became the first Black student admitted to the University of Mississippi. And seven years after Foster's departure, Black students finally returned to the University of Alabama, with Vivian Malone Jones and James Hood registering in 1963 over the opposition of Gov. George Wallace, who made his symbolic "stand in the schoolhouse door."
"Autherine Lucy Foster opened that door," former University of Alabama trustee and retired judge John H. England Jr. said last month, addressing the trustees. The school overturned Foster's expulsion in 1988, and she soon returned to campus, receiving a master's degree in elementary education in 1992. She was awarded an honorary doctorate in 2019 and was on campus last week to attend the dedication for an education building named in her honor.
The building was previously named after David Bibb Graves, a former Alabama governor and Ku Klux Klan leader. Trustees announced they would rename it Lucy-Graves Hall before reversing themselves following criticism, settling on the name Autherine Lucy Hall. State officials also granted Foster the honorary title of "master teacher."
"For you to bring me out today, the Lord must be on each of our sides," Foster said at the dedication ceremony. She added, "If I am a master teacher, what I hope I am teaching you is that love will take care of everything in our world."
Autherine Juanita Lucy was born in Shiloh, Ala., on Oct. 5, 1929. By most accounts, she was the youngest of 10 children and grew up on a farm owned by her parents. Her father also worked as a blacksmith and made baskets and ax handles.
Foster graduated from high school in Linden, Ala., and studied at Selma University and Miles College, a historically Black school in Fairfield, Ala., where she received a bachelor's degree in English in 1952.
Shortly after graduating, her friend and classmate Pollie Anne Myers, a journalist and NAACP activist, suggested they try to enroll in graduate programs at the University of Alabama. "I thought she was joking at first, I really did," Foster recalled.
They submitted applications that were accepted by school officials who backpedaled after learning they were not White. Lawyers including Marshall and Arthur Shores sued the university, accusing it of racial discrimination, and the case wound its way through the courts as Foster took jobs as an English teacher and insurance company secretary.
A federal judge sided with Foster and Myers in 1955. But after school officials discovered that Myers had gotten pregnant before she was married, they revoked her acceptance on moral grounds, leaving Foster to enroll alone.
She registered over the public opposition of her parents, who feared what her enrollment would provoke among White people. "Why, I keep asking myself, out of all the colored folks in Alabama, did this have to fall to my baby daughter's lot?" her father told reporters, according to Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff's book, "The Race Beat."
Foster married Hugh Foster, a minister, in 1956, shortly after she was expelled from the university. She made speeches at civil rights functions and took substitute teaching jobs in Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas but said it was difficult to find work until she and her family returned to Alabama in 1974.
"You were the infamous Miss Lucy," she recalled being told at interviews, "and we don't want you to come to our school."
She had four children, but information on survivors was not immediately available.
Interviewed by the Times in 1992, shortly before she received her master's degree, Foster said she had long dreamed of returning to the University of Alabama. "Even after I left, when I passed the university, I would look at those buildings and I would say, 'Girl, you've got great aspirations.' I could see myself at that university."
She acknowledged she was bitter upon her return but sought to move forward, saying, "You just refuse to spend time thinking about it."