'Bama Considers

An uneasy quiet lay over the University of Alabama, as if the campus had, for the present at least, been shocked into some semblance of sanity. The safety-first suspension of Negro Autherine Lucy still stood, but a good segment of 'Bama seemed to have decided that violence is not the answer to the problems raised by her admission (TIME, Feb.20).

Had things been otherwise, there might well have been another eruption of rioting. One evening last week two Negro brothers beat up a university sophomore in the street because they wanted "to get even for the way they treated Miss Lucy." The police booked the brothers on a charge of attempted murder, whisked them out of town in the fear that there might be trouble. The trouble never came.

Meanwhile, about 20 students signed a petition asking that Autherine be allowed to come back to her classes. Then, at a convocation of 7,500 students, President Oliver Cromwell Carmichael finally took a stand. He demanded that all students help maintain order to "remove the cloud which, in the minds of many, now hangs over our beloved alma mater." Though the university had fought by every legal means to keep segregation, he said, it could not fly in the face of a court decree ordering the trustees to take in a Negro. "No great university can afford to defy the laws of the land and thus set an example of lawlessness before its students

. . . Obviously, society could not long endure if its institutions of higher learning should array themselves at the side of lawlessness . . . I believe I can count on each of you, both faculty and students, to cooperate in such manner as to make certain that the University of Alabama will be on the side of law and order.''

Whether law and order will actually prevail if Autherine comes back, no one could tell. Led by a racist sophomore from Selma, Ala. named Leonard Wilson, a Tuscaloosa White Citizens' Council was determined to do everything possible to keep her away. But Autherine herself was equally determined. While waiting for the courts to hear the contempt charge she filed against the university trustees for suspending her, she has been living and studying at nonsegregated Talladega College (enrollment 275), 118 miles from Tuscaloosa. She has even turned down a scholarship offer from the University of Copenhagen. Said she: "I keep hoping and praying that this disturbance caused by my desire for the best education I could get will come to an end soon. I still have faith it will work out for the best."

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