JULIETTE HAMPTON MORGAN: FROM SOCIALITE TO SOCIAL ACTIVIST

Alabama Heritage, Summer 2004 by Stanton, Mary

With her latest letter Morgan had gone too far. Offended readers flooded the Advertiser with their own angry letters demanding that Morgan be removed from the library where she had recently been promoted to head of the research department. But Superintendent Dixie Lou Fisher refused to fire her, and the Board of Trustees, in a split decision, supported Fisher. They instructed Morgan not to write any more letters if she wanted to continue working at the library. She promised to comply.

Morgan was appalled when her alma mater, the University of Alabama, expelled Autherine Lucy, its first black student, in February 1956. But she did not pick up her pen. For more than a year she kept silent. In December 1956 the boycott ended, and the city buses were integrated. Black homes and churches were bombed, and boycott leaders and those who had supported them were terrorized by the White Citizens' Council and the Klan. Still, Morgan wrote nothing.

On January 5, 1957, Buford Boone, editor of the Tmcaloosa News, addressed a meeting of the West Alabama White Citizens' Councils and challenged the businessmen in its ranks to demonstrate some leadership. It was their fault, he said, that violence continued to plague Tuscaloosa a full year after Autherine Lucy's expulsion. Morgan read Boone's speech in the library's copy of the Tuscaloosa News. She wrote him a congratulatory note the following day.

Boone replied, "I certainly enjoyed reading your letter [and] I think [what you said] is interesting, helpful, and will prove stimulating to many of our readers." He enclosed a copy of the keynote address delivered that night by the leader of the Arkansas White Citizens' Council. Boone wrote, "I shall be surprised if you are not more than a little sick after reading it, but Coreland is an example of the rabble-rouser problem in this difficult situation." Boone also requested permission to publish Morgan's letter.

At first she was not sure what to do. Publishing the letter would mean breaking her promise and losing her job. Yet Morgan felt a personal responsibility to encourage like-minded whites to stand up and confront racism as Boone had done. She wondered if her letter might inspire frightened whites to come forward and finally take a stand in Montgomery. In the end she made the difficult decision to allow Boone to publish her letter. She wrote:

There are many Southerners from various walks of life that know you [Boone] are right. They know the Court is right, they know what they call "our Southern Way of Life" must inevitably change. Many of them even are eager for change, but they are afraid to express themselves-so afraid to stand alone, to walk out naked as it were. Everyone who speaks as you do, who has the faith to do what he believes right in scorn of the consequences, does great good in preparing the way for a happier and more equitable future for all Americans. You help redeem Alabama's very bad behavior in the eyes of the nation and the world. I had begun to wonder if there were any men in the state-any white men-with any sane evaluation of our situation here in the middle of the Twentieth Century, with any good will, and most especially with any moral courage to express it.