“Suddenly the Supreme Court announced the desegregation of education facilities, the first to be Ms. Arthurine Lucy at the University of Alabama that fall. A handful of us formed a protection group to surround her to classes. Mobs with broken down cars and shotguns sticking around. Students were acting like mobs. On the last day, going with Arthurine to class, a violent shouting mob chased her, we rushed her into the nearby library, locked the doors, moved every student or worker out. We stayed there til 3 a.m., then skipped her out to safety when everyone seemed to be gone, tucked her on the floor of the backseat, covered by a blanket. Arthurine was alive and back home. She was never allowed to return. Years later, under President Kennedy, two other black students entered and ended segregation there. It was not pleasant for the few of us who defended her. Just not the usual friendliness. Except I was picked up by a car of a few white racists, driven to a corn field, beat up, and left there. A farmer picked me up on a nearby road and took me to the university hospital. I was ready to go jump in clear water again. I was getting closer to finding that heroic community up ahead. ”

Racism: White Boys Can Jump, Father David Kirk

“As a humanist and socialist, my conversion to Jesus Christ in the Church, 1953, came in the midst of violence and race riots at the University of Alabama, when the Supreme Court demanded that the first Black student, Arthurine Lucy, be admitted to a southern university.”

The History of Emmaus as a Melkite Ministry, Father David Kirk