Colin Rafferty Doors
Their monument sticks like a fishbone in the city’s throat. —Robert Lowell, “For the Union Dead”
Spring came to Tuscaloosa, a brief two-week season between
the forty-degree winter and too-humid summer, and the trees have all blossomed. I can’t see any of that, though. When I look around the building I’m in, Foster Auditorium, the only thing I find is all the proof of its neglect and decay: paint peeling off the walls, falling on to the dusty floor. Loose ceiling tiles wobble precariously as air barely circulates around the room. All the doors, except the one I’ve just walked through, have heavy chains and locks around them, and two orange bars form a cross on the top of each basketball hoop, keeping them from play. If I’d attended the University of Alabama forty years earlier, I would have come to register for my classes here in Foster Auditorium. Now I’m not here to do anything but look around, which is pretty much all anyone does with Foster anymore, since no one seems to know what to do with a building with a history. All the history of Foster Auditorium can be reduced down to a single day, June 11, 1963, when Governor George Wallace, fulfilling the promise he’d made in his inaugural speech that January, attempted to block two black students from enrolling for the summer session, and thereby integrating the university. Nicholas Katzenbach, acting as the official representative of the Kennedy administration, and with the backing of the federalized Alabama National Guard, ordered Wallace to stand aside and allow Vivian Malone and James Hood to enter the building and enroll. Wallace acquiesced, and the moment became another victory for the civil rights movement, the latest in a long string of successes that had started only a short drive down the highway in Montgomery, where Martin Luther King, Jr. had led the boycott of the bus system eight years earlier. After the integration of the University of Alabama, the civil rights movement experienced other, bigger events: the March on Washington Crab Orchard Review
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