“Turning the Tide: The University of Alabama in the 1960s”
Author: Earl H. Tilford
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
Pages: 252
Price: $34.95 (Cloth)
Earl Tilford offers what seems a very useful way to think of the history of the University of Alabama. He suggests there have been three UAs, or rather the university has been born, then faded and reborn twice. The first university dates from the founding in 1831 and ends when the Union troops burned all but four buildings in 1865.
UA was closed from 1865 until 1870 and the second era began.
Tilford is not unduly negative about this “second” university but does point out that as of 1912 there were only 400 students and by 1936 under 5,000. Mainly under President George Denny, Alabama had been transformed from “a sleepy backwater academic institution…into a relatively sophisticated university, competitive with similar institutions across the Deep South.” Tilford is perfectly candid, however, that Alabama was still considered a party school, not an academic heavyweight.
The University was not to undergo its third birth and present incarnation, however, until the years under Frank Rose from New Year’s Day, 1958, until his resignation in 1968 and the accession of thirty-three-year-old David Mathews, Rose’s hand-picked-and-groomed candidate.
This study is mainly the story of the Rose years, and Frank Rose is its hero. Under Rose, Alabama became “an oasis of modern thought in a sea of reactionism.”
Rose recruited and kept better-qualified faculty, increased salaries, attracted out of state students, started new programs, raised standards in a myriad of ways and managed to attract considerable financial support from D.C., the Kennedy and then the Johnson administration.
Bur President Rose, always mindful of the violence at Ole Miss in 1962 and the failure here to enroll successfully Autherine Lucy in 1956, felt he must move “slowly and cautiously” towards integration and towards what he unabashedly called “the pursuit of excellence.”
All this was done while always, every day, having to take Governor George Wallace and a conservative populace into account.
Tilford reminds the reader (too many times, I think), that “football provided cover.” Rose hired Paul Bryant and Alabamians were soothed by winning football teams. But, Tilford insists, “sports history is a form of cultural history” and “the gridiron victories not only kept the university in the good graces of many, if not most, of the state’s white citizenry and legislators, it also served to divert their attention from a process of liberalization on campus.”
Rose disappointed his more liberal supporters mainly in the areas of free speech and censorship. There was controversy over whether the “Crimson-White” could endorse a gubernatorial candidate—it would not be George Wallace even though it was certain he would win—and over the students’ right to invite controversial speakers such as Abbie Hoffmann or Bettina Aptheker to come to campus.
While Dr. Rose is presented as maneuvering successfully under intense pressure, Dr. Mathews receives mixed reviews. Mathews had been installed only one year and seemed, to Tilford, unprepared to deal with the student anger, demonstrations and rebellion of the spring of 1970, demonstrations ignited by the Kent State killings. Attorney Jack Drake, in his Foreword, while sympathetic to Mathews’ dilemma, feels nevertheless that he “overreacted” to what were, by any national standards, gentle student protests.
Someone else, Mathews insisted, called in the Tuscaloosa PD but did not tell him. The police, sometimes with their name tags removed and badge numbers hidden, arrested scores unnecessarily and roughed up a number of students, radicalizing the traditionally apathetic undergraduates. Mathews was perceived as unresponsive to student “demands.” Students complained he was “stonewalling.” He repeated on several occasions there would be no amnesty for students and he would not negotiate under duress. Unfortunately, duress was the condition of the day.
In the long closing section Mathews is described as “shaken” by students’ vehemence and determined to be firm on matters of discipline and investigate “what charges might be brought against students involved in disorder.”
Mathews thus lost the support of many conservative students, including sorority and fraternity members, some of whom joined Yippies from the English Department in subsequent demonstrations.
Another structuring device Tilford employs to good effect is the intertwining of two individual students’ stories. Jack Drake, from a Birmingham blue-collar family, was something of a campus progressive, as undergraduate and law student. Carol Self was a sorority girl and cheerleader. That these two would meet and feel they had enough in common to fall in love and marry says worlds about the 60s and the gulf that opened between students and university authorities while the traditional gap between students of different backgrounds narrowed.
This is not the last word on ’Bama in the 60s , before cell phones, texting and the need for a 4.0 to get into law school retranquilized the student body, but for those who were there and for those who wish they were, it is required reading.
This review was originally broadcast on Alabama Public Radio. Don Noble is host of the Alabama Public Television literary interview show “Bookmark” and the editor of “A State of Laughter: Comic Fiction from Alabama.”
