On This Day In Alabama History: Spring Hill Students Repulsed KKK

By Graydon Rust Alabama 200

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

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