Autherine Lucy Foster, the first African-American student to enroll at the University of Alabama, will speak at 7 p.m., Wednesday, Oct. 23, at the Laidlaw Performing Arts Center on the University of South Alabama campus. Sponsored by USA’s African-American Studies Program and the Department of History, the talk is free and open to the public.

Foster will discuss her role in the fight for desegregation in 1956 and the impact of those experiences on her life and career.

The daughter of Milton and Minnie Lucy, Autherine Lucy Foster was the youngest of ten children in a Marengo County, Ala., tenant farming family. After graduating from Linden Academy in 1947, she attended Selma University and subsequently earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Miles College in Birmingham.

At Miles she met Pollie Anne Myers, a classmate active in the local NAACP Youth Council. In September 1952, with NAACP support, Foster and Myers began a four-year court battle to gain admission to the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. Myers was ultimately refused admission but Foster, who hoped to study library science, was admitted in compliance with a federal court injunction in February 1956.

The four-year interval between Foster's initial application and her admission witnessed the landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling against school segregation in Oliver Brown et.al. v. Topeka, Kansas, Board Of Education (1954).

Her brief time at Alabama was marked by campus and political unrest, and served as a focal point for the desegregation movement in the South. Foster was expelled by the university’s board of trustees just days after her enrollment. Her expulsion was formally revoked by the university’s trustees in 1988. She returned for graduate study and, in 1992, received her master’s degree in education.

Now retired from teaching in the Birmingham public schools, Foster remains active in volunteer work. The University of Alabama has endowed a scholarship in her honor and has placed her portrait in the student center. The inscription accompanying the portrait reads, "Her initiative and courage won the right for students of all races to attend the University."

For more information, please contact Dr. Clarence Mohr, professor and chair of the department of history at USA, at 460-6210, or Bob Lowry, associate director of public relations, at 460-6211.

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