Civil Rights
As a private, segregated institution, Samford University was to some degree insulated from the activities of leaders and protesters of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and early 1960s. Birmingham was the site of demonstrations led by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and Dr. Martin Luther King to end segregation of public facilities and open city jobs to minorities. The era was marked by nationally covered protests and the deaths of four young African-American girls in the Easter 1963 bombing of a Birmingham church.
A growing core of Samford faculty and students opposed segregation. The officers of the Samford Student Government Association challenged a segregated concert held on campus by the Alabama Symphony by inviting as guests the student government officers of nearby Miles College, a historically black school. University officials turned away the combined delegation from the concert.
University president Leslie Stephen Wright resisted integration, but Samford's "whites-only" policy threatened Federal student aid and institutional accreditation. Segregation by private universities was ended by the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act by the US Congress. Cumberland School of Law faced the greatest immediate risk of losing accreditation. In 1967 it admitted Samford's first black student, Audrey Lattimore Gaston. The entire university proceeded with integration.
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Famous quotes containing the words civil rights, civil and/or rights:
“The common goal of 22 million Afro-Americans is respect as human beings, the God-given right to be a human being. Our common goal is to obtain the human rights that America has been denying us. We can never get civil rights in America until our human rights are first restored. We will never be recognized as citizens there until we are first recognized as humans.”
—Malcolm X (1925–1965)
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—Frances Beale, African American feminist and civil rights activist. The Black Woman, ch. 14 (1970)