William Hooper Councill

Who was William Hooper Councill?

William Hooper Councill was a former slave and the first president of Huntsville Normal School, which is today Alabama Agricultural and Mechanical University in Huntsville, Alabama.

He was born a slave in Fayetteville, North Carolina, 1848 and taken to Huntsville, Alabama by slave traders in 1857. He and his mother and brothers were sold as slaves from the auction block, at Green Bottom Inn to Judge David Campbell Humphreys. At this auction he saw two of his brothers sold in 1857, and never heard from again. He attended a school opened by northerners in Stevenson, Alabama in 1865 and remained until 1867, when he began teaching. During Reconstruction after the American Civil War, he held minor political positions in Alabama, and taught for a time at Morris Brown College in Atlanta, Georgia and edited a newspaper in Huntsville, Alabama. In 1873 he served as secretary to the National Equal Rights Convention. He was appointed as president to AAMU in 1876 after he gave his political support to conservatives. In 1883, he became part of the Supreme Court of Alabama.

As a contemporary of Booker T.