Schoolhouse Door: Segregation's Last Stand at the University of Alabama

Description: Full of courageous African American applicants, fist-shaking demonstrators, and powerful politicians, this powerful book captures the dramatic confrontations that transformed the University of Alabama into a proving ground for the civil rights movement and gave the nation unforgettable symbols of its struggle for racial justice. History professor Clark is Assistant to the President at the university.

Review Quotes: "When integrationists stood up to segregationists in the American South during the 1950s and 60s, right confronted wrong, virtue challenged evil, good guys battled bad. E. Culpepper Clark, assistant to the president of the University of Alabama, has a taste for drama -- as well as for moral principle -- and with the desegregation of his own university he had at hand a subject ideally suited to his inclinations and talents. The Schoolhouse Door: Segregation's Last Stand at the University of Alabama is old-fashioned narrative history, readable, involving, immediate and propelled by a motley cast of characters, each of whom had to make ethical choices that would affect not only his or her own future but also that of the nation as a whole."
--New York Times Review of Books

"This is an important and moving story. Clark tells it well, respecting his historical actors by treating them critically but fairly and respecting his readers by allowing them to draw their own conclusions."
--American Historical Review