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July 8, 2012
In Brooklyn, a Friend Is a Hero in Disguise
The New York Times
by Kevin Baker
A friend of the late newspaperman Dennis Holt reveals that as a young man, Holt acted courageously during the first attempt to integrate the University of Alabama. Sadly, he clearly lost that moral compass when it came to Atlantic Yards.
Then, in 1993, a book came out that made us see him in a whole new light: E. Culpepper Clark’s superb history of the long fight to integrate the University of Alabama, “The Schoolhouse Door.” It begins with the effort to enroll a young black woman named Autherine Lucy at the university in February 1956. And there, to our surprise, was Dennis Holt.
The appearance of the incredibly courageous Ms. Lucy triggered wild rioting by Alabama students, considerably augmented by outside agitators. The mob roamed freely about the campus for hours, screaming racial epithets, setting fires, attacking a passing black motorist, and even pelting the wife of the university president with eggs and rocks when she tried to appeal for calm. Ms. Lucy was fortunate to escape with her life.
Dennis, we discovered, was president of the arts and sciences college council of Alabama at the time, “brilliant, eloquent and popular,” and the national college debate champion. Along with a handful of other brave students, he turned away a group of drunken rioters seeking to break into the university president’s residence. Dennis and his companions told them, “You’re not going anywhere.”
The next day, Alabama’s board of trustees gave in to the mob, and voted to ban Ms. Lucy from campus for her own safety. It was a dishonor that Dennis and his fellow student leaders were not willing to share. They held a public meeting, in which Dennis described the people he had kept from entering the president’s mansion as “two high school boys and a man so drunk he could barely lurch.” Turning them back wasn’t hard: “That’s all it took — just a little resistance.”
NoLandGrab: Holt made deriding the resistance to Atlantic Yards a regular, recurring theme in his columns. Guess he was afraid to stand up to Bruce Ratner's bullying.
Posted by eric at July 8, 2012 9:53 PM