Good Try in Alabama

The 220-lb. sheriff with the nightstick mentality, the glacial rate of voter registration, the Negroes waiting in the rain--all these symbols of disgrace in Selma, Ala., have been in headlines and news pictures for five weeks. But Selma has its assets too, and one of them is Dr. James H. Owens, a peppery, knowledgeable Negro educator who is struggling valiantly to keep the area's only Negro college alive.

Owens, erect and brisk at 64, readily concedes that his Selma University is wildly misnamed. It is not a full college, much less a university, since only its three theology students study for four years. It cannot get accreditation from the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools even as a junior college, because it has no science building, pays its faculty $1,000 less than the required minimum of $4,500, and has no teachers with master's degrees in science, mathematics, English, business or social science. Owens' problem is money. In fund raising, he says, "you always get the run-around because you're not accredited. But if you could get some money, you could buy the equipment and staff to become accredited. It's the old story--he that has shall get."

"Looked & Left." Owens came to Selma U. as president in 1956 after 26 years in education. Son of an Acme, N.C., factory fireman, he worked at railroad jobs to finance his chemistry and French studies at Richmond's Virginia Union University. He later earned a master's degree in psychology at the University of Michigan. He taught at Mississippi's Tougaloo College and for 13 years at Leland College in Baker, La., becoming its president. When he first saw Selma U., Owens recalls, "I looked, turned around and left." Then, after deciding that the president's job would be "a real challenge --and I have been foolish enough to do things like that all my life," he returned and accepted.

Founded in 1878 by the Alabama Colored Baptist Convention as a theological school, Selma had evolved mainly, into a teacher-training institution. As late as 1950, it also taught 500 grade-school children crowded out of the town's inadequate Negro schools. When Owens arrived, Selma was down to barely 100 students, including some still completing high school, and its five buildings were going to ruin. On 21 acres of flat land where brown cows still graze, the school consisted of two aging red brick dormitories, a tiny red cafeteria and a dilapidated classroom building called Dinkins Hall. "The floors were so bad you got splinters if you wore thin shoes," Owens recalls. There was another academic building, but it had to be torn down at once, says Owens, "for insurance reasons--but even more for esthetic reasons."

He concentrated the curriculum on a solid two-year preparation for senior college work in liberal arts, business education and teaching. He helps out his eleven-man faculty by teaching two biology classes, a speech class and sometimes a psychology class. His wife, who holds a master's degree in education from Michigan, works as the registrar. Enrollment is now 209.

A Poverty Area. Owens persuaded the Alabama Baptist State Convention, a Negro organization, to launch a fund drive among its 1,000 churches to build a handsome, $102,000 tan brick library and to pay part of the cost of a $220,000 gymnasium and classroom building. Most of the rest was financed by a $100,000 five-year loan--the school's only debt. Nearly the only non-Negro help the school has received has been $49,000 in building funds and $6,000 yearly for salaries of two theological teachers from the all-white Southern Baptist Convention.

Operating funds are particularly short. Dinkins Hall is falling apart, but Owens can afford barely $5,000 a year for maintenance and repairs. Of his $126,000 annual budget, only $50,000 comes from tuition, room and board. Tuition is a mere $40 a semester, room and board only $32.50 a month. Owens could raise these charges, but he fears that his students could not afford any more. "This is a poverty area, you may as well face it," he says.

Selma's most noted graduate is Autherine Lucy, the girl who cracked the color barrier at the University of Alabama in 1956. The school is segregated only because whites will not go to it; Owens nourishes a small hope that some day the low tuition may attract a few. The school's students take part in the Selma voter-registration demonstrations, but Owens, overburdened with duties at his school, does not. He himself has been a registered voter ever since he moved to Selma.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.