The Battle For the University of Alabama

"The University of Alabama was burned to the ground in the final days of the Civil War. In the war's aftermath, survivors constructed a new collection of buildings using many of the bricks left from the original campus. Nevertheless, the university's presidency changed frequently, Alabama had a new egalitarian constitution created by a racially diverse coalition of Republicans, the fate of the University of Alabama soon became a key battleground in the contested nature of state. Assuming control of the university shortly before its formal reopening, the new state Board of Education dismissed the previous regime's chosen faculty, replacing them with idealistic Republican outsiders in a firestorm of controversy that set the stage for further conflicts to come. Inflamed by reactionary rabble-rousers, Tuscaloosa became a notorious hotbed of intimidation and violence against 'radical' Republicanism, African Americans, and the University of Alabama, where a series of short-lived presidencies, financial crises, brutal threats, fabricated controversies, and a dwindling student body came to symbolize Alabama's complicated Reconstruction experience in the public eye. As the university's leaders struggled to shore up its fortunes, Democratic interests-abetted by the Ku Klux Klan-began to regain political power, leveraging the university's difficulties as a Trojan horse to recapture the governor's office in 1870. This splintered Republican-led reformist efforts and initiated the steady reconsolidation of elite white power across the state, including the University of Alabama. In 'The Battle for the University of Alabama and the Perilous Path of Higher Education in the Reconstruction South,' William Warren Rogers Jr. traces this incredible yet little-known story of the bitter contest for the fate of a cultural citadel in relation to the histories of other public universities in the former states of the Confederacy as they struggled to make their own way after the war"