When racism and hate have threatened, history tells us something certain: young Black men and women have always met the moment with courage. From the classrooms they were told they could not enter, to the buses and bridges where they were told to sit down and be silent, they rose. They did not retreat. They endured. And by their courage, they changed a nation.
This week, Alabama A&M University was targeted by a vile threat—an email filled with racist slurs and violent fantasies of bombs and guns. It promised that students in the J.F. Drake Library would “have a BLAST” and boasted of a plan to “just start shooting.” It was designed to terrorize, to intimidate, to make students afraid of pursuing the very education that is their right.
Instead, after campus and law enforcement investigations, the university declared an all-clear. There was no imminent danger—only the hollow voice of a coward trying to rattle a community that has known greater threats and survived them all.
Dr. Daniel K. Wims told the Bulldog community: “Today’s events serve as a reminder of our resilience and unity. I encourage all members of our campus community to remain vigilant and aware of their surroundings.” His words stand in the long tradition of leaders who knew that the answer to hate is not fear, but courage and resolve.
And in Alabama, that tradition runs deep. In 1961, the Freedom Riders—most of them barely out of their teens—were beaten and firebombed in Anniston and Birmingham, yet they kept going. In 1963, children filled Birmingham’s jails during the Children’s Crusade, facing police dogs and firehoses with nothing but their voices and their faith. In Selma, young John Lewis and so many others marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge and paid in blood for the right to vote. That same year, Governor George Wallace made his infamous “stand in the schoolhouse door” at the University of Alabama to block the enrollment of Vivian Malone and James Hood. Wallace’s defiance collapsed in the face of federal authority—and those students walked in.
But the struggle was not only Alabama’s. In 1957, the Little Rock Nine walked through screaming mobs to integrate Central High School in Arkansas. In 1960, four young men in Greensboro, North Carolina, sat down at a Woolworth’s lunch counter and refused to move, sparking a movement that swept across the South.
All of them were young. All of them were told to be afraid. All of them answered with quiet, unshakable courage.
That same spirit lives on in Huntsville, on “The Hill” at Alabama A&M. Founded in 1875 to educate freedmen and their children, A&M has always been a place where knowledge stood as defiance to hate. Every student who walks its campus today—no matter their race, background or walk of life—inherits that legacy. When they sit in class, when they open their books, when they dare to dream of a future better than the past, they are carrying forward the same spirit of resistance.
The author of this email wanted to stop young Black men and women from learning, rising and leading. Instead, he gave them another reason to press forward. Fear and intimidation have never prevailed. They did not stop the Little Rock Nine. They did not stop the Greensboro Four. They did not stop the Freedom Riders, the children of Birmingham, the marchers at Selma, or Vivian Malone and James Hood as they walked into the University of Alabama. And they will not stop this generation either.
So to the students of Alabama A&M: go to class. Learn. Rise. Lead. That is how you answer hate. That is how you honor those who came before you. And that is how you will change this nation.
