Vivian Jones, 63, Defied Governor Wallace As University of Alabama’s First Black Graduate

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Vivian Malone Jones, one of two black students whose enrollment at the University of Alabama led to George Wallace’s infamous “stand in the schoolhouse door” in 1963, died yesterday. She was 63.


Jones went on to become the first black to graduate from the school.


A retired federal worker who lived in Atlanta, Jones grew up in Mobile, Ala. and transferred to the University of Alabama from historically black Alabama A &M University in Huntsville in 1963. The move led to then-governor Wallace’s infamous stand in defiance of orders to admit black students. Jones and another student, James Hood, accompanied by then-Deputy U.S. Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, enrolled after Wallace finished his statement and left.


When he stepped aside, she said, that allowed them to enter the university.


“I was never afraid. I did have some apprehensions in my mind, though, especially having gone to segregated, ‘separate, but equal’ schools,” she said.


Jones said her religious beliefs gave her confidence to persist, and she graduated in 1965.


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