Alabama Afternoons: Profiles and Conversations

Vivian Malone and James Hood: The Stand In the Schoolhouse Door

Vivian Malone and James Hood THE STAND IN THE SCHOOLHOUSE DOOR In 2003, I contacted by phone Vivian Malone and James Hood prior to the fortieth anniversary of their enrolling in The University of Alabama. The occasion seemed right to turn back the clock, to capture their remarkable memories. Two years after these conversations, Vivian Malone passed away at age 63. O n a sweltering day forty years ago this week, Vivian Malone of Mobile and James Hood of Gadsden set out to enroll for classes at The University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa. With U.S. attorney general Robert Kennedy orchestrating the event from Washington under the watch of President John F. Kennedy, and with Alabama governor George Wallace blocking the students’ way, the registration assumed an epic scale, a confrontation between federal and state governments, a standoff between a chief executive with a civil rights agenda and a state leader defiant of one. Malone and Hood, both 20-year-old black students at the door of an allwhite university, had stepped, jarringly, into history. Vivian Malone Jones these many years later says she had anticipated, sadly, what might occur that morning but hoped her home state could do better. She knew of the racial antagonism that Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes had been met with on January 9, 1961, when they enrolled at the University of Georgia in Athens. The following year, on September 30, James Meredith ’s matriculation at Ole Miss in Oxford, Mississippi, had been the catalyst for riots, tear gas, and gunfire. “I figured by the time Alabama integrates, everybody else has done it,” Malone says from her Atlanta home, her warm, reflective voice summoning yes- 134 WITNESSES TO THE MOVEMENT teryear as though it were today. “Surely, Alabama won’t raise up the flag of hatred or denial. That’s when the governor came in with his stand on ‘segregation now and forever.’ I knew we weren’t going to be in for a smooth transition .” She spent the night of June 10, 1963, with family friends in Birmingham— Hood stayed in another home—and the two linked up to ride in a government car to Tuscaloosa, accompanied by Assistant Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach and John Doar of the Department of Justice. The car was hardly alone. “We had a caravan,” she says. Along the way, the cars came to a halt, and she remembers officers communicating by two-way radio with the White House. “They didn’t have sophisticated communications like they do now. We had to make sure the presidential proclamation was being delivered,” Malone says, referring to the “cease and desist” order being signed in Washington by Secretary of State Dean Rusk. Katzenbach would give a copy of that order to Wallace. Vivian Malone, one of the first African Americans to attend The University of Alabama, walks through a crowd that includes photographers, National Guard members, and deputy U.S. attorney general Nicholas Katzenbach. Photo by Warren K. Leffler, courtesy of the Library of Congress. VIVIAN MALONE AND JAMES HOOD 135 When they arrived at the Tuscaloosa campus, Malone was startled by the presence of armed guards on the front lawn. “And I had never been around that much press before—cameras everywhere.” What happened next was broadcast throughout the country and seared into the national consciousness. Katzenbach got out of the car and approached Wallace and offered the presidential proclamation, demanding admission for the students according to court order. Wallace, stalwart in front of the doors of the university’s Foster Auditorium, refused. Malone watched the proceedings from the car. Looking around at the sea of officials, Malone remembers thinking: “It is such a shame that the government has to spend this kind of money for these two little black students to go to school!” She adds, though, “I wasn’t the reason the money was being spent. I really did have a right to be there. I was not imposing on anybody.” Her religious upbringing helped sustain her, the lessons of faith she learned growing up in the Emanuel AME Church in downtown Mobile, she says. “I attended that church from age six until I moved away. I still consider myself a member.” The support of her parents in Mobile, Willie and Bertha Malone, both now deceased, also gave her heart. “Now that I look back, they were amazingly strong. They were right there the whole way. They...