January 21, 1957

Students at Spring Hill College in Mobile successfully repulsed a raid by the Ku Klux Klan. Late that night, students studying for exams heard the Klansmen outside the dormitory hammering together a kerosene-soaked cross and ran them off with makeshift weapons. The Klansmen returned the next night and burned a cross outside the college gates, to which students responded by hanging a Klansman in effigy with a sign that read “KKKers ARE CHICKEN.” Three years earlier, the college voluntarily became the first white college in the Deep South to desegregate, a decade before any others.

Read more at Encyclopedia of Alabama.

One of the original buildings at Spring Hill College. This building burned in 1869. (Spring Hill’s 75th anniversary yearbook, photograph by E.W. Russell, HABS, Library of Congress, Wikipedia)

Main building at Spring Hill College, Mobile, 1935. (Photograph by E.W. Russell, HABS, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division)

Main building at Spring Hill College, Mobile, 1935. (Photograph by E.W. Russell, HABS, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division)

For more on Alabama’s Bicentennial, visit Alabama 200.