admitted its first black students in September 1954, a few months after the Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional Mrs. Fannie E. Motley was the first black graduate from the institution in 1956. Even that late start made Spring Hill College comparatively early in educational civil rights for Alabama's African Americans. In his 1963 "Letter from Birmingham Jail," Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said he "commend[s] the Catholic leaders of this state for integrating Spring Hill College several years ago." On the night of January 21, 1957, a dozen or more darkened cars entered the main avenue of the college. Ku Klux Klan members tried to set up a kerosene-soaked cross outside Mobile Hall, a dormitory. They were unaware that they were there during finals week. Most of the white, male residents were still awake, studying for exams, and several heard the hammering. Once alerted, students streamed from both ends of the building carrying whatever items were handy as weapons – golf clubs, tennis rackets, bricks, a softball bat – and put the panicked Klansmen to flight. A KKK contingent returned the next night, burning a cross at the gate of the college before students reacted. The following day, a group of students – male and female – hanged a Klansman in effigy at the college gate, with a sign reading, "KKKers ARE CHICKEN." On July 27, 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald spoke at Spring Hill about life in the Soviet Union, at the invitation of his cousin, a student at the college. His speech was considered controversial because of strong opposition in the United States to communism during the Cold War. His lecture took place months before he assassinated President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963. Following Hurricane Katrina's widespread destruction along the central Gulf Coast in 2005, Spring Hill accepted 117 students, the majority of them from Loyola University in New Orleans, a sister Jesuit institution, for the remainder of the year. Student body More than 1,400 students study at Spring Hill College each year, of which more than 56% are from outside Alabama. The student body is 39% male and 61% female; 90% of the freshman class and 70% of the total student body live on campus. The student-faculty ratio is 13:1, and the average class size is 13. Of faculty members, 91% hold doctorates or