Wallace Meets Black Student He Tried to Bar

Former Gov. George C. Wallace met James Hood for the first time Tuesday, 36 years after Wallace vowed to “stand in the schoolhouse door” to keep black students Hood and Vivian Malone from registering at the University of Alabama.

Hood is now a doctoral candidate at the university. Wallace, a sickly man who is now just a shadow of the fiery segregationist governor he was in 1963, hopes to be in good enough health to see him receive his degree next month.

Wallace renounced his segregationist views years ago but Hood still wanted to meet him “because you never get to know a man until you look him in the eye.”

They met privately for about 20 minutes in Wallace’s office. Afterward, Hood, 54, said he had asked whether the former governor really believed that segregation was right.

“His answer was that it was right politically. He does not agree with that now, but he felt that the people of the state of Alabama expected that,” Hood said. “He was a segregationist, and that’s something it was acceptable to be in this state in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s.”

Asked whether he forgave Wallace, Hood said he did. “I have never had any reason not to forgive Gov. Wallace,” he said

Wallace, Hood and Malone did not meet when the governor made his largely ceremonial stand at Foster Auditorium on June 11, 1963. After declaring his opposition to federal officials, Wallace left, and the two students--with a National Guard escort--were enrolled.

Hood said he doesn’t recall being angry or afraid he would be hurt.

“I guess the question was why?” Hood recalled. “Not why he was there, but why was this necessary? Why did I have to be confronted to attain this right that was in the Constitution, that had been guaranteed to me?”