Vivian Malone Jones, 63, Dies; First Black Graduate of University of Alabama
NY Times
Vivian Malone Jones, who on a blisteringly hot June day in 1963 became one of two black students to enroll at the University of Alabama after first being barred at the door by the defiant governor, George C. Wallace, died yesterday in Atlanta. She was 63.
Vivian Malone Jones’s effort to enroll at the University of Alabama led to George Wallace’s infamous “stand in the schoolhouse door” in 1963.
The cause was a stroke, her sister Sharon Malone told The Associated Press.
Her entrance to the university came as the civil rights struggle raged across the South. On June 12, the day after Ms. Jones and James Hood were escorted into the university by federalized National Guard troops, the civil rights leader Medgar Evers was shot to death in Jackson, Miss.
On May 30, 1965, Ms. Jones became the first black to graduate from the University of Alabama in its 134 years of existence, earning a degree in business management with a B-plus average.
The performance of Governor Wallace, who stood at the doorway of Foster Auditorium flanked by state troopers, fulfilled a campaign pledge stop integration at “the schoolhouse door.”
But historians have written that his defiance was scripted and came with a promise to federal authorities that he would be brief and would soon comply.
At the time, The Tuscaloosa News wrote contemptuously that the governor “squeezed every suspenseful moment of drama from the occasion.”
The students waited in a car, as Nicholas deB. Katzenbach, deputy attorney general of the United States, avoided a direct confrontation. He said to Mr. Wallace: “From the outset, Governor, all of us have known that the final chapter of this history will be the admission of these students.”
Only after the federalized guard troops arrived, four and a half hours after Mr. Wallace’s initial refusal, were the students admitted. Mr. Wallace read a second statement challenging the constitutionality of the court order, then briskly left.
The students entered Foster Hall, registered, went to their dormitories, ate in the cafeteria and experienced no further incidents that day.
