Participants Revisit ‘Schoolhouse Door’ : Gathering Marks Wallace’s Attempt to Bar Blacks at Alabama U.

confrontation beneath the blazing Alabama sun provided a moment now riveted in the history of the civil rights movement in America.

A defiant, provocative George C. Wallace, six months into his first term as governor, stood in the doorway of the University of Alabama’s Foster Auditorium and refused to permit two young blacks to register as students.

It was a stunt as futile as it was theatrical and dangerous.

Four times, Wallace rejected the request of Deputy Atty. Gen. Nicholas Katzenbach to stand aside.

But, a few hours later, with the Alabama National Guard federalized and Wallace gone from the campus, 20-year-old Vivian Malone and 20-year-old James A. Hood were led into the auditorium to register for the summer term, desegregating the last all-white state system of higher education.

400 in Attendance

On Friday, about 400 scholars, public officials and civil rights leaders gathered on the same campus for a look back on the 25th anniversary of the standoff between Wallace and federal authorities.

“This was a national crisis,” said Frank Rose, who was the university president at that time. “It was not just the University of Alabama, it was not just the state of Alabama.”

The “stand in the schoolhouse door” fulfilled a campaign pledge by Wallace, who had begun his first term six months earlier with a battle cry of “segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” It also catapulted Wallace into the national spotlight and set him on the road to his first of four races for the presidency.

Participants in the drama who returned here Friday remembered Wallace with some bitterness for precipitating a crisis at a time when the South was already seething with racial unrest.

Uncertain Outcome

Despite months of efforts by university officials and local businessmen, the outcome was still uncertain when Katzenbach and Wallace met.

“At no time did we really know what Gov. Wallace would do,” Katzenbach said Friday. “We hoped, we tried to get commitments, but we could not be certain.”

Rose, who was a friend of then-Atty. Gen. Robert F. Kennedy, had acted as a go-between trying to keep each side informed of the other’s intentions. But the Justice Department did not feel it could fully reply on his information.

“Frank Rose was very good, telling us what the governor was going to do,” Katzenbach said. “We had great confidence in Frank Rose, but the governor did not have great confidence in him, so we were never sure that what he was telling us was true or false.”

Wallace, out of office for a year and a half, confined to a wheelchair since an attempted assassination and in failing health, was invited to take part in the three-day conference but declined.

‘Bad Public Relations’

University officials showed an excerpt from an interview in which he called blocking the doorway “bad public relations” and added, “I’m sorry I did it that way.”

During his last campaign and his last term in office, Wallace’s segregationist views were strikingly muted. Even many black rights leaders in Alabama spoke sympathetically of his “change.”

But officials who dealt with him in the desegregation crisis expressed skepticism Friday about any change of heart.

“He has not changed one whit,” said J. Jefferson Bennett, who was the university’s administrative vice president. “George Wallace is a vote counter.”

The crisis over the admission of Malone and Hood occurred more than seven years after the admission of black student Autherine Lucy set off rioting on the campus, followed by her suspension and expulsion.

In the interim, university officials fended off a growing stream of applications from black students.

E. Culpepper Clark, a historian now writing a book on the period, said one applicant was told that his mother, who was seeing a psychiatrist, would be committed to a mental institution if the student persisted in trying to enter the university.

The crisis over Malone and Hood occurred in the wake of violence and mass arrests in civil rights demonstrations in Birmingham and the violent desegregation of the University of Mississippi.

Wallace maintained that his personal presence on the campus was his means of keeping away Ku Klux Klansmen and other toughs.

But Wallace biographer Dan T. Carter of Emory University said there would have been no crisis atmosphere had Wallace not vowed to personally block the students. He said the episode showed Wallace as “the ultimate practitioner of guerrilla politics.”

Realizes His Skills

After being cast into the national spotlight, Carter said, Wallace quickly “learned that he had the skills to reach beyond the traditional Southern audience . . . that there were a lot of rednecks outside of Alabama.”

But Carter added: “On paper, the governor lost the battle. Despite all of his promises and resistance to the end, and all of his rhetoric about states’ rights and Alabama-style interposition, Vivian Malone and James Hood were enrolled.”

University officials said the school prevailed in the long run.

Despite the riots attending Lucy’s admission, and years of turning away qualified black applicants with form letters, Rose said the university has come “to demonstrate to the world that we belonged to the human race--and that we belonged to the part of the human race that was highly civilized.”