It is the year 2013, fifty years since the infamous “Stand in the Schoolhouse Doors” event that took place at The University of Alabama. There have been celebrations and media coverage to mark the changes and progress the university has made in integration since 1963. The university even has a website titled ‘Through the Doors” available to the public to commemorate the memorials built in honor of these “pioneers” and to mention others who played a key role in this historical event. There is a section on the website titled “UA African American Experience 2003”. Through data collected and research, the question of how The University of Alabama presents the black experience to the public will be answered.

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Ashanti Richardson
COM 499
Dr. Meredith Bagley
Through The Doors
Intro
It is the year 2013, fifty years since the infamous “Stand in the Schoolhouse
Doors” event that took place at The University of Alabama. There have been
celebrations and media coverage to mark the changes and progress the university
has made in integration since 1963. The university even has a website titled
‘Through the Doors” available to the public to commemorate the memorials built in
honor of these “pioneers” and to mention others who played a key role in this
historical event. There is a section on the website titled “UA African American
Experience 2003”. Through data collected and research, the question of how The
University of Alabama presents the black experience to the public will be answered.
Literature Review:
Methods
Data was collected through random surveys to various students of different
races and faculty on campus, interviews with black faculty members, narrative
criticism of the website. Narrative criticism looks specifically at narratives or
narrative elements of artifacts to identify and analyze features such as characters,
setting, narrator, events, relations, and themes. Rhetors look at the overall meaning
and purpose of the narrative and how this narrative applies to the audience. The

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website was critiqued using narrative criticism. The major theme, audience, events,
and causes and effects were all identified following the guidelines of Sonja K. Foss.
Content Analysis was used to analyze data collected from the university
website. Content analysis is a research tool focused on the actual content and
internal features of media. It is used to determine the presence of certain words,
concepts, themes, phrases, characters, or sentence within texts or sets of texts and
to quantify this presence in an objective manner. The possible outcomes of content
analysis can include the revealing of international differences in communication
content, the existence of propaganda, intentions, attitudinal and behavioral
responses, and the psychological or emotional state of a person or group. According
to Dr. Klaus Krippendorff, who provides the most widely used studies of content
analysis, six questions must be addressed in every analysis. In the analysis of the
through the doors website, questions answered include: the data analyzed, how they
were defined, the population from which they were drawn from, the context in
relation to the data analyzed, the boundaries of the analysis, and the targets of the
inferences.
Public Memory
Public memory is important in answering how the university presents the
black experience. According to Kendall R. Phillips, “the ways memories attain
meaning, compel others to accept them, and are themselves contested”. The
University of Alabama’s use of a website to archive the events from the past and
present is important, but they must also chronicle current events related to this
issue to build a bridge between retroactive action and prospective action. Phillips

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also divides public memory into six dimensions. (Phillips 6) The first is
remembrance versus forgetting, remembrance being the most vital and defining
aspects of public memory.
Without personal memories and stories, public memory would be lost or
essentially forgotten of the schoolhouse doors events. Phillips continues on with the
second dimension which involves authority versus resistance. The University of
Alabama is given the authority and responsibility to choose to publicly remember
these events and it is up to the rest of the public to accept or contest them. The third
dimension spins off the second contrasting responsibility versus absolution. The
public has to be willing to accept the responsibility of remembrance or clear
themselves from any responsibility. Furthermore, Phillips presents the issue of
appearance as opposed to loss.(Phillips 7) By creating a webpage, The University of
Alabama has acknowledged the loss of memory, the schoolhouse doors mentioned
subjectively, they are not spoken of as what “is” or what “was”. Phillips also
presents a complicated situation in which the ways memories are repeated. The
public will all remember in a different way, and that often leads to repetition versus
mutation. There is going to be an uncertainty of memories, their elusiveness, and
their flexibility.(Phillips 9) Lastly, Phillips terms the struggle of the public to let our
memories remain stable and immutable as hegemony versus instability. In relation
to the historical events at The University of Alabama, the public cannot grasp them
fully nor fix them permanently. (Phillips 9) UA’s community has a responsibility to
only envision a fixed stable memory, chiseled in stone or encased within museum

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walls, as they have done so with the physical memorials placed around their
campus.
The University of Alabama has been the centerof news stories describing
events of racialtension fifty years later, contrasting the story of progress and change
on the website. In the article, “Bridging Collective Memories and Public Agendas”,
Keren Tenenboim provides a solution to using media coverage as a piece of memory
and a resource. This article furthermore states that time does not only limit and
delay journalism, but can also be creatively used as a free resource. Journalism can
find some of its unique social contribution in creative interactions between past and
future in the coverage of current events. And it is through closely examining these
interactions and through new integrations between long-separated theoretical
frameworks that communication and journalism scholars can rethink what
journalism is and can be in these changing times. (Tenenboim-Weinblatt 107)
The Black Experience at Predominantly White Institutions
With the recent media coverage of the fiftieth anniversary, The University of
Alabama must craft an accurate representation of the black population at the
university on the website. Literature and research surrounding the experiences of
Black students at predominantly White institutions has increased within the last
two decades. These scholarly works focused on interactions within an overall
campus culture, and the effects of campus climate on student experiences. Most of
the research on African American students at predominantly white institutions

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(PWIs) indicates that black students have a hard time adjusting to social and
academic integration. They suggest that race directly plays a role in success at the
college level. In the book, Embodying Black Experience, Harvey Young collects a set
of black experiences, or what he calls, "phenomenal blackness," that developed from
the experience of abuse and resistance that were devised to respond to the highly
predictable and anticipated arrival of racial violence within a person's lifetime. The
University of Alabama needs to create a space for students on their website to share
stories and perspectives, not just numbers and statistics. Literature and research
surrounding the experiences of Black students at predominantly White institutions
increased within the last two decades. These scholarly works focused on
interactions within an overall campus culture, and the effects of campus climate on
student experiences.
Through a number of interviews and surveys collected at The University of
Alabama in relation to the black experience, Brian Bourke offers similar
perspectives and studies that describe the cultures that Blacks have within PWI’s.
Using the qualitative approach method, forty black students shared experiences
encountering stereotypes in their everyday life, both on and off campus, highlighting
that seeking refuge from the hegemony and dominance of Whiteness of the campus
in off-campus activities was not always possible. He also claims that this
permanence of race in their everyday lives causes black students to face barriers in
engaging in this culture.Bourke divides his findings from this study into several
different “cultures”. He describes a culture of athletic expectations from black
students, campus tradition, a culture of privilege, and an overall devaluing of

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experiences. (Bourke 128-130) Data collected in surveys at The University of
Alabama revealed similar experiences from some students.
The University of Alabama choice to incorporate the success of its black
faculty members as well as students is important because they also have
experiences that are important to understanding the true black experience at the
university. Information collected from surveys and interviews from The University
of Alabama faculty relate to Douglas A. Guiffrida and Kathryn Z. Douthit who present
a similar argument except they focus on the role of faculty in understanding the
sociocultural challenge that Black college students face in their transitions to PWIs
can provide an invaluable means of support and advocacy for these students to
facilitate their academic success. (Guiffrida 311)
The goal of surveys collected from students at The University of Alabama is
very similar to Tonisha Hamilton’s work. She conducted research on the factors that
might place Black students at risk of discontinuing their higher education. One
hundred and eighty seven students were used through path analysis to conclude
that for Black students at PWIs and HBCUs alike, completion of college is both
directly and indirectly related to a blend of individual, environmental and racial
experiences which, speculatively, may be affected by interventions designed to
reduce Black student dropout rates. (Hamilton 72) Results and information
collected from University of Alabama faculty reveal that many uphold these same
beliefs.
Analysis

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The section titled “UA African American Experience 2003” on the university’s
website fails to accurately represent the black students and faculty. Although the
information states that the page is archived from ten years ago, it conflicts with the
major theme of courage, change, and progressidentified through narrative criticism.
Narrative criticism identifies the story The University of Alabama is telling on
the website about the historical events that took place between 1963 and
2013.When using the Narrative Criticism method, the critic must follow the
following three steps: 1) Identify the objective of the artifact; 2) Identify the features
of the narrative to discover how they accomplish the objective; 3) Assess or evaluate
the narrative according to the particular objective. The overall theme and objective
The University of Alabama presents on the Through the Doors website is that they
welcome and celebrate diversity. This is articulated through their use of statistics, a
list of accomplishments, pictures of different races together on campus, and
resources that detail plans of action. The overall objective is clear in the repeated
image of the three words courage, change, and progress. Key features of the website
that identify the narrative include the section that names “pioneers”. These are the
people who played active and vital roles in the events that took place. The university
also offers a brief timeline dedicated to telling the story of what happened, year by
year. The audience can be anyone who would to acquire information about the
schoolhouse doors events. They are necessarily a participant in the events
recounted. The university has created a space that celebrates the actors who
contributed positively to the university. It can be inferred that the audience has
some prior knowledge of the situation because they do not include people who

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negatively affected the image of the university. The cause and effect relationships
established in the narrative are clear. The enrollment of black students in 1963
opened the doors for black students in the future to succeed academically. The
events portrayed in the narrative created by the university were largely caused by
human action. They do not go into detail, so this leaves the audience a responsibility
to form their own memories and opinions. A primary defining characteristic of a
narrative is that it is comprised of at least two events. The University of Alabama
names the first major event of the enrollment of Autherine Foster n 1956 which led
to the enrollment of Vivian Malone and James Hood in 1963, which is where the
story of successful integration basically begins. The events described express action
but also the condition of the story. Without this narrative, the section titled “UA
African American Experience 2003” would not exist.
The second method used in my research was content analysis. Content
analysis focuses on the actual content and internal features of media.It is used to
determine the presence of certain words, concepts, themes, phrases, characters, or
sentences within texts or sets of texts and to quantify this presence in an objective
manner.The results are then used to make inferences about the messages within the
texts, the writers, the audience, and even the culture and time of which these are a
part. Using the six questions provided by Dr. Klaus Krippendorff, I analyzed The
University of Alabama’s Through the Doors website to answer how they present the
black experience at the university to the public.
The first step in content analysis is to define the data and concept you are
looking for. I already identified the major theme of the website through narrative

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criticism as the “celebration of diversity”. The next step in content analysis is to
create a set of words or phrases that relate to this theme or concept. Through the
website The University of Alabama most frequently uses words such as courage,
progress, multicultural, commitment, community, opening, doors, today, and
change. Next, the population they are drawn from is identified as the faculty, staff,
and students. In the fourth question, Krippendorff asks whether or not the context is
relative to the concept analyzed? The University of Alabama accurately places these
words in relation to the concept of diversity. Next, boundaries of analysis are
identified. This is the only space that the university offers that deals directly with
the question of the black experience at the university, so yes there are boundaries of
analysis. Lastly, the targets of the inferences are identified. For this website and
specifically the “UA African American Experience 2003” section, the targets are nonspecified and can be anyone regardless of race. They do not lean towards drawing in
on a certain race or group of people. The use of this section is the present evidence
in the University of Alabama’s claim to change and progress.
Through content analysis, the existence of propaganda was detected, the
intentions of the institution were found, and the present understoodpsychological
conditions of the institution were revealed.
The University of Alabama is an public educational institution so their overall
aim is to get as many people to enroll and attend their school. The section analyzed
uses statistics and numbers to describe the accomplishments of its black students
and faculty. By not providing actual stories, perspectives, and names they provide a
vague view of what the black experience is and escape possibilities for questions of

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actuality. The propaganda revealed in this section shows the university’s overall aim
to get more students enrolled.
The intentions of the institution were to depict a stage where black students
shine bright academically, backing there assertion of doors opened and progress
made. The frequent use of the word multicultural reveals the intent of the university
to say that not only welcome blacks, but other races as well.
The general psychological condition of the university were also revealed in
their frequent uses of the word commitment. They include several sections under
their page titled Strategic Diversity Plan such as the president’s statement of
“Commitment to Diversity”.
Data collected through random surveys completed by students and faculty
revealed that most of the UA community is in support of changes to the Through the
Doors website. Information was obtained through a list of six questions given to a
total of twenty-five students in five groups, with twenty black students.
1. Do you feel as if your position here at a PWI is more effective than at an
HBCU?
2. Would like to be more accurately represented on the through the doors
website?
3. Do you feel “the black experience” at UA can easily be defined? Is there even
such a thing?
4. Your job as UA faculty/student is important already. Are you obligated to
more responsibility being a black faculty member/student?
5. Was the 50th anniversary a large theme or event within your department?

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6. Would prior knowledge of the events at UA have affected your decision to
teach/enroll here at UA? Negative or positive?
Eighty-four percent of the survey takers feel as if their presence at UA is
more important at UA than at an HBCU. One hundred percent believed the website
does not achieve accurate depictions of the “experience” of black students and
faculty and would like to be better represented. When asked if the “black
experience” at UA could be defined, one hundred percent answered no. Eighty- eight
percent of the surveyed believe they hold more responsibility as a black faculty
member/student. Only twelve percent of the survey takers identified the 50th
anniversary as a large theme or event within their department. Eighty percent say
that prior knowledge of the schoolhouse doors events would have affected their
decision to teach/enroll at The University of Alabama.
Discussion/Implications
These results suggest The University of Alabama needs to create a space on
the website where the actual black students and faculty can be seen and heard. Not
just numbers and statistics to represent their accomplishments and experience. In
response to the data collected, the office of President Bonner has agreed to
collecting more perspectives and encouraging participation on the website. For
several weeks, the university included an announcement in the campus- wide email
newsletter encouraging submission of perspectives on the website. The
announcement reads:
“UA students, faculty and staff are encouraged to visit
the “Through the Doors” website and contribute their
memories and experiences on the Your Stories page under
the “Perspectives” link. The Through the Doors website is

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devoted to the 50th anniversary of UA’s desegregation and
also serves as a source of historical information, beginning
with Autherine Lucy’s attempt to enroll at UA as the first
African-American student in 1956”
This is only the beginning and first step in making changes the to the website.
Through continued correspondence with the office of UA President Judy Bonner,
information will be collected and submitted for posting and public view on the
Through the Doors website. Also, in cooperation with faculty in the African
American Studies department, a new term or phrase will be proposed to replace “UA
African American Experience” on the website.
Conclusion
Through narrative criticism, content analysis, surveys and interviews
information was assessed in how The University of Alabama presents the black
experience at their university. Narrative criticism revealed that the website uses
characters, major events, and an overall theme of diversity to promote the idea of
change within the institution. Content analysis detected the existence of
propaganda, intentions of the university, and overall present conditions at the
university to reveal an agenda of more racial integration. Random surveys and
interviews conducted discovered attitudes towards the information presented on
the university’s website involving the black experience. The university fails to
accurately represent this group of individuals and must create a space on this public
site for members to share stories and perspectives, not just numbers and statistics.
References
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