Vivian Malone Jones opened door to blacks at university

Vivian Malone Jones, who was the first black graduate of the University of Alabama and whose enrollment prompted Gov. George Wallace's infamous "stand in the schoolhouse door," died yesterday at Atlanta Medical Center. She was 63 and suffered a stroke Tuesday, relatives said.

Known for her courage, quiet determination, intelligence and grace, Mrs. Jones was one of two black students who crossed through Foster Auditorium June 11, 1963, to enroll at Alabama after Wallace yielded to the federalized Alabama National Guard and stepped aside.

James Hood was the other black student, but he left the university only weeks after his admission. Mrs. Jones graduated in 1965 with a degree in industrial relations. She had studied at Alabama A&M for two years but wanted opportunities she felt she could get only from the flagship school.

"Her courage, passion and determination helped pave the way for countless others and helped to change Alabama and the United States for the better," said Theodore Shaw, president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

Mrs. Jones remembered that fateful June day as being as dangerous as it was hot. Civil-rights protests in Birmingham where fire hoses and police dogs had been turned on demonstrators were fresh in the 20-year-old's mind. But she remained resolute.

"I had the privilege of representing all those who fought for simple justice," Mrs. Jones said in a commencement speech at the university in 2000. "The simple act of walking through a schoolhouse door that had been barred to me, and all people of my color ... that simple act represented an end to legal segregation in the American South."

Alabama was the first Southern university ordered to desegregate after the U.S. Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling, but it was the last to do so. A black graduate student, Autherine Lucy Foster, enrolled under a court order in 1956 but was expelled shortly afterward.

Despite her role in history, Mrs. Jones' admirers said, she never traded on her fame. A native of Mobile, she held public-sector jobs for decades and retired in 1996 as an administrator with the Environmental Protection Agency in Atlanta.