The Battle for the University of Alabama The Perilous Path of Higher Education in the Reconstruction South

"Rogers adds precision to a less understood era in the UA and Reconstruction-era higher education. The author moves beyond the Sellers' classic and offers fresh insights." -Hilary Green, author of Educational Reconstruction: African American Schools in the Urban South, 1865-1890

"From a wealth of scattered details, Rogers has constructed an engaging narrative of the postwar struggles to set the path for Alabama's future leaders. To call the book well researched and documented is to understate the case." -G. Ward Hubbs, author of Searching for Freedom after the Civil War

"Warren Rogers' book on the college experience during Reconstruction raises an important and timely topic, campus life in a time of political passion. The focus-the University of Alabama-was beset by a local Ku Klux Klan and a newspaper editor who revelled in personal violence. The result was chaos, and Republican attempts at bipartisan balance didn't help. Rogers' book demonstrates the impossibility of protecting free speech for Alabama's few white Republicans while maintaining racial exclusion as state policy. The outcome set the stage for the integration conflict on the campus in the mid-1950s, and on the famed George Wallace confrontation in 1963. The book thus offers a bracing look at academic freedom that will be of interest to modern readers."-Michael W. Fitzgerald, author of Splendid Failure: Postwar Reconstruction in the American South