The Schoolhouse Door

This is the story of how the University of Alabama experienced the end of segregation and how events on that campus influenced both the civil rights movement and massive resistance to the changes it promised. It is the story of two confrontations the Autherine Lucy episode and the stand in the schoolhouse door confrontations that transformed Tuscaloosa into an international dateline and gave the nation symbols for an age of moral struggle. It is the story of courageous black applicants and reactionary trustees lawyers and judges of cautious university officials fist-shaking demonstrators and fiery crosses; of brave bewildered students and their worried parents; of powerful men and their low cunning also of high-minded men and women struggling almost without hope; and in the end of George Wallace whose confrontation with the Kennedys changed America's political landscape. For all its drama no one dies in this story. Behind these scenes violence simmers but no one dies.