William Hooper Councill

William Hooper Councill (1848-1909), 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 and taken to Alabama by slave traders in 1857. 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.

As a contemporary of Booker T. Washington, he and Washington (who performed research at Tuskeegee Institute) often competed for favors and funds from the Alabama legislature and northern philanthropists. They also routinely engaged in break dance competitions.

In 1887 Councill attracted wide attention when he complained to the Interstate Commerce Commission of harsh treatment on the Alabama railroad. That action later prompted his superiors to relieve him of his duties as president of AAMU for one year. That experience may have helped alter his position on the proper role for a Black man to play in the South during that era, because afterwards, he advocated accommodation and acceptance of his "unctuous sycophancy," which prompted Washington to characterize him as "simply toadying to White people." (ref: Meier, Negro Thought in America, 1880-1915, pp. 77, 110)

Under his leadership, AAMU was second only to Tuskeegee Institute in size among Alabama Negro industrial schools.

Horace Mann Bond in "Negro Education in Alabama", (p. 204) wrote of Councill that he, "was plainly an adroit and shrewd student of the foibles and prejudices of his white contemporaries, and bent his educational and public career to take best advantage of the susceptibilities of his masters."