Although choosing BSC meant staying close to her Birmingham family, Dr. Tondra Loder-Jackson ’89 wanted to find a home on the Hilltop. Through the Black Student Union (BSU) and her sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha, she was able to do just that.

“One of my proudest moments was joining ranks with the BSU to advocate for racial diversity in the SGA,” Loder-Jackson says. “Our advocacy resulted in two BSU representatives being named to the SGA. Being part of the Panhellenic Council enlightened me to racial and cultural tensions in campus Greek life.”

Advocating for on-campus equal representation was just the beginning. Loder-Jackson is now a professor in UAB’s Educational Foundations and African American Studies programs and the co-founder and former director of the UAB Center for Urban Education. She has published extensively on Birmingham’s civil rights and educational history, African American education, and urban education. Published in 2015, her most notable work, “Schoolhouse Activists: African American Education and the Long Birmingham Civil Rights Movement,” explores the power that educators in the 1960s and today have as activists in a system that grapples for educational justice.

She credits professors such as Drs. Edward Lamonte, Jane Archer, Bill Nicholas, William Ramsey, and Charles Moore in shaping her academic and professional trajectory. One Honors Program course, “The Urban Experience,” further influenced her by showing her the interconnectedness of urban culture and politics.

“We traveled to the New Orleans Jazz Festival and learned about the diversity of urban history, politics, and policy across the United States.”

A strong believer in knowing one’s history, Loder-Jackson challenges the BSC community – alumni, faculty, and students alike – to learn more about the College’s role in the Civil Rights Movement. She calls BSC’s 2019 establishment of a Distinction in Black Studies program “a watershed moment in the history of BSC” that she hopes will evolve into a major and its own department of multicultural studies.

“Every BSC student should know the pantheon of BSC civil rights trailblazers: former President Henry King Stanford, Marti Turnipseed, Skip Bennett, and, more recently, Bernard Mays, Jr. As students learn this history, they can determine where they fit within BSC’s trajectory of making a difference in Birmingham and beyond.”

Advice: “BSC students, faculty, and alumni should know their College’s history… A good starting place is to read Dr. Bill Nicholas’ Alabama Review article, ‘The Dilemma of the Genteel Tradition: Birmingham-Southern College in the Civil Rights Era, 1957-1965.’ It should be a required reading for everyone on campus.”

This story was published in the Fall/Winter 2020 issue of ’Southern, BSC’s alumni magazine.

If you have ideas for our next issue of ’Southern, please email [email protected]. We always welcome stories about outstanding people from the BSC community.