Former Stillman Professor Honored For Role In Local Civil Rights Movement

TUSCALOOSA, AL — A black-and-white photo from the 1960s of Civil Rights marchers in downtown Tuscaloosa collected dust on the wall for years in the Tuscaloosa County Sheriff's Office.

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And as time passed, its story drifted into relative obscurity.

That is until it caught the interest of Chief Deputy Loyd Baker — a career lawman who also serves as the sheriff's office's de facto historian. Along with his recent work on developing a more historically accurate image of Chief Tuskaloosa, Baker has labored tirelessly digging through archives and working contacts to shed light on another historic moment for Tuscaloosa.

The black-and-white photo is as captivating as it is symbolic, depicting two men, one Black and one White, marching side by side during one of the protests over segregated accommodations at the Tuscaloosa County Courthouse in the summer of 1964.

It's a photo that embodies what little good could be found in this corner of the world during such a tumultuous era of discrimination and racial division.

The protests were a peaceful response to broken promises over bathrooms and water fountains at the courthouse, which culminated in demonstrations trickling from First African Baptist Church being met with violence at the hands of local law enforcement and deputized members of the Ku Klux Klan.

On the right-hand side was Stillman faculty member Japheth Hall, Jr., a distinguished mathematician and educator who dedicated his entire career to Stillman College. A pillar in Tuscaloosa's West End, Hall served as chairman of the Department of Mathematics at Stillman College and was heavily involved in scores of pursuits in higher education.

Hall died in March 1980 at the age of 50.

Opposite Hall in the photo, however, was a seemingly out-of-place White man in a dark coat whose name might have faded into local history if not for the collective dedication of Chief Baker, University of Alabama professor and author John Giggie, and Stillman College professor Gordon Govens.

And on Friday, Emory University professor emeritus Bill Chace — the determined White man in the photo — was honored as part of the University of Alabama's "Realizing The Dream" awards on the eve of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.

Others honored included University of Alabama Student Government Association President Samad Gillani and Nurse Vera Jenkins Booker — one of the supervisors at Good Samaritan Hospital in Selma who tended to civil rights activist Jimmy Lee Jackson after he was fatally shot in what would prove a pivotal event during the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama.

Ahead of Chace receiving his honor Friday night, a short video was played for the crowded ballroom in the Bryant Conference Center that included Chace reminiscing on sitting in the second row at First African Baptist Church as King spoke on March 8, 1964, just a few months before the violence of Bloody Tuesday.

While this was a milestone for many, Chace was no stranger to King and had heard him speak in Washington, D.C., following "The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom," which was held on Aug. 28, 1963, and featured King's now-famous "I Have a Dream" speech.

"I went and I stood in the back of the church," Chace recalled, before saying a deacon from the church ushered him closer to the front. "That told me, interestingly enough, that while I didn't know that many people, many people in the town knew me. I think people sort of got used to seeing this young White man marching back and forth and saying 'he probably teaches at Stillman.'"

By all accounts, Chace was a passionately involved member of the Stillman faculty, caring deeply for his students' interests and struggles. So much so, he even performed in theatrical productions on the Stillman campus, including playing the role of Eland in "Lost in the Stars" — a musical adaptation of Alan Paton's novel "Cry, The Beloved Country" — and as The Suitor in "The Death of Bessie Smith."

Chace was presented with the Call To Conscience Award on Friday for his time at Stillman during the 1963-1964 academic year as part of the Wilson Fellows program, which encouraged educators to take teaching positions in the South.

After posing for a photo with Tuscaloosa Civil Rights foot soldier Irene Byrd, Chace sat quietly as others watched a video where he recalled his brief time at Stillman College and reflected fondly on his pupils, many of whom were first-generation college students.

"So for them, this was an extraordinary opportunity and I was impressed by the seriousness in which they engaged themselves," Chace said, before recalling a young woman named Nellie Hester.

Hester asked her professor one day if he would accompany her on one of the buses in town and sit up front with her.

Chace gladly obliged and has admired the woman ever since.

"That struck me as an act of courage and fellow feeling I'll never forget," he said in the video. "So thank you, Nellie Hester."

Nevertheless, Chace knew tensions in Tuscaloosa were leading to something and the events that followed the aforementioned photo became known as "Bloody Tuesday" — representing a fever-pitch in Tuscaloosa County's history as Chace became the only White demonstrator to be jailed amid the chaos.

ALSO READ: The Ghosts Of Bloody Tuesday: Remembering 'Tuscaloosa's Freedom Summer'

In digging through the archives at the sheriff's office, Chief Baker uncovered Chace's mugshot and beamed with pride after meeting the man he had wondered so much about.

"It was an awesome experience," Baker told Patch after meeting Chace in person on Friday. "He stayed on our wall probably 15 years before we knew who he was and with John Giggie's book, I realized there was a name. It's just awesome that we were able to find him and honor him for what's been forgotten for so long."

Giggie's book "Bloody Tuesday: The Untold Story Of The Struggle For Civil Rights In Tuscaloosa" was released last year, but the author told Patch that he first began collecting Civil Rights Movement oral histories in 2009 from those in the West End.

"I think there is a growing sense of urgency among different people to revisit history that has been either hidden or not fully publicized," Giggie told Patch over coffee in December. "But now you see [Tuscaloosa Mayor Walt Maddox] apologized very early in his tenure for what his predecessors had done, and then you have Sheriff Ron Abernathy and Chief Baker. How many sheriffs have authorized their staff to go through old documents to document what happened in a way that's honest and open?"

As expected, Chief Baker downplayed his involvement in the effort when asked about his role but said he was proud to be a part of preserving and contextualizing the history of the sheriff's office to benefit the department's community relationships, while promoting awareness for future generations.

"You look at some of these old photos and you remember the injustices that were done where law enforcement was complicit," Baker said. "It's satisfying to be on the right side of history now when you get to honor people with great courage who stood against the tide of the time. The sheriff has always said "If we don't put history out there, we're going to repeat it," and this was not law enforcement's finest moment."

Chace is depicted in Giggie's extensively researched book, which tells of the Maryland native and English doctoral student at the University of California, Berkeley, who spent an academic year teaching at Stillman College and became part of the second wave of peaceful demonstrators walking two-by-two to the county courthouse on "Bloody Tuesday."

With Chace as the only White demonstrator, Giggie wrote that much of the anger from the hostile crowd focused on the doctoral student, who was at one point hit with a police cattle prod after an officer told him he was walking too slow on the city sidewalk.

Chace then staggered out of the line of marchers and onto the courthouse lawn, before being tackled by police and taken to jail.

"Chace was the only arrest," Giggie writes. "He was quickly booked and charged with vagrancy, resisting arrest, assault and battery, and unlawful assembly. Bond was set at $1,000 for each charge, the equivalent of $9,700 in 2023. When first jailed, he was placed in a holding cell with a Black man, whose arrest was unrelated to the March."

"I now believe that maybe the police were trying to protect me when they put me in a cell with a drunken Black guy who was supposedly going to beat the shit out of me," Chace told Patch following the "Realizing The Dream" awards ceremony. "When I told him why I was in there, he said 'I'm not gonna do that to you.' Maybe the police were confused about what was going on."

Giggie goes on to write that guards moved Chace to a private, Whites-only cell before his bond was posted by the Tuscaloosa Citizens For Action Committee — a good-faith advocacy group formed amid the maelstrom of civil unrest and violence.

Giggie also noted that Chace wrote a column about his experience following his release that was published in the Stillman College newspaper: "It has a way of obsessing us. Like a condemned man with an eternal task, we again and again return to it. ... "One of the most desperate complications is that all of us are not really interested in solving the problem."

Six decades later, solving the nagging scourge of systemic racism is the mission of many looking to keep local history alive by telling the stories of those who lived it, like Chace.

Stillman College's Executive Director of Faith-Based and Social Justice Initiatives Gordon Govens, an associate professor at the college, is among those ranks and has been working along with Baker and Giggie to curate a photo art gallery on the Stillman campus commemorating the events of Bloody Tuesday and the individuals who participated in the demonstrations.

The gallery is in a modest building across the street from the Myrtle Williamson Memorial Prayer Chapel and features several photos from the marches to the Tuscaloosa County Courthouse, along with several letters from officials at the time that provide a multifaceted narrative from organizers and authorities, alike.

"This didn't even exist three months ago," Govens told Patch of the gallery in December. "We've got to create something for the community to see and this picture [of Bill Chace] came up and I didn't know who these guys were, so this picture became the center of what piqued my interest to start doing this."

Giving a quick tour of the gallery, Govens said he hoped to develop more interactive exhibits, such as a photo gallery of the Stillman College students who participated in the local Civil Rights Movement, complete with QR codes for each student so visitors can learn more about their individual stories.

"It's been forgotten by alumni and the town just how important and how significant Stillman was to the entire heritage of this place," he said.

Sitting at dinner before the awards ceremony began, the 86-year-old Chace was encircled at a table by his lovely wife JoAn, Chief Baker, Giggie, Govens and this reporter. At one point, I overheard Chace remark on how much had happened in his life between that fateful day in 1964 and the 2025 Realizing The Dream Event on the UA campus.

Indeed, the native of Palo Alto, California went on to join the faculty at Stanford after his time in Tuscaloosa, which saw him work as a professor of English and eventually as vice-provost for Academic Planning and Development.

Chace left California in 1988 to become president of Wesleyan University in Connecticut, before then being hired as the president of Emory University in 1994 — a position he held until until 2003.

Bill and JoAn Chace, despite being well into their 80s, were generous with their time and even let me join them for drinks at the Hotel Capstone bar following the ceremony.

We talked at length, at times passionately, about William Faulkner's "Light in August" and debated other literary topics in what became one of the most enjoyable experiences of my journalism career.

But well after the bar's last call and as I put arms around them both to say goodbye, I was reminded of what brought Bill Chace back here six decades after winding up in a Tuscaloosa jail cell on a hot summer day and landing on the right side of history.

"It did come as a pleasant surprise," he told me about the honor he received on Friday. "It's 60 years ago and I'm not that different of a person. I was 25 years old or so at the time, naive in many ways. I never thought I did anything wrong. It wasn't a mistake, it was just something I couldn't have planned for. I didn't know what I was getting into and still don't understand parts of it. But the basic result of all that is I decided to become a teacher. And that's why I went to Stillman."

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