James A. Hood, who integrated the
University of Alabama in 1963 together with his fellow student Vivian Malone after Gov. George C. Wallace capitulated to the federal government in a signature moment of the civil rights movement known as the “stand in the schoolhouse door,” died on Thursday in Gadsden, Ala. He was 70.
His death was confirmed by his daughter Mary Hood. On the morning of June 11, 1963, Mr. Hood and Ms. Malone, backed by a federal court order, sought to become the first blacks to successfully pursue a degree at Alabama. A black woman, Autherine Lucy, had been admitted in 1956 but was suspended three days later, ostensibly for her safety, when the university was hit by riots. She was later expelled.
Having previously proclaimed “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever,” Wallace was blocking the entrance to Foster Auditorium on the university’s Tuscaloosa campus, while ringed by state troopers, when Nicholas deB. Katzenbach, then the deputy attorney general, approached him together with federal marshals. Mr. Hood and Ms. Malone remained nearby in a car.
Mr. Katzenbach demanded that Wallace obey a federal court order implementing the injunction issued in Ms. Lucy’s case. But Wallace was defiant, challenging its constitutionality. Mr. Katzenbach said he would be back with the students later in the day and fully expected them to be admitted.
President John F. Kennedy federalized several hundred members of the Alabama National Guard, who arrived on campus in the afternoon. Their commander, Brig. Gen. Henry V. Graham, went to the auditorium door for a second confrontation. He told Wallace it was his “sad duty” to order him to stand aside. Wallace read another defiant statement, denouncing “military dictatorship,” but departed, presumably having saved face with segregationists in an orchestrated show of defiance.
Mr. Hood had a brief, dispiriting stay at Alabama. He lived in a dorm room on a floor where the only other occupants were federal marshals. A dead black cat was mailed to him, and university officials sought his expulsion for a speech attacking them and Wallace. He was also distraught because his father had cancer. He left the university on Aug. 11, 1963 — “to avoid,” he said at the time, “a complete mental and physical breakdown.”
He obtained a bachelor’s degree from Wayne State University in Detroit and a master’s degree from Michigan State, concentrating in criminal justice and sociology. He was a deputy police chief in Detroit and the chairman of the police science program at the
Madison Area Technical College in Wisconsin.
Mr. Hood returned to the University of Alabama to obtain a doctorate in interdisciplinary studies in 1997.
