MOBILE, Ala. – Forty years ago, long before I had ever set foot in Alabama, I knew about a college girl named Vivian Malone and a governor named George Wallace.
To a 12-year-old girl living in Texas, they were the face of Alabama – a state somewhere far away, whose cities had names like Selma and Montgomery and Birmingham, where little girls died in Sunday school bombings and policemen turned fire hoses on black people.
It was a place where the governor blocked the doorway of the state university so that neither Malone nor any other black person could attend.
Alabama was much more than that, of course, but in the 1960s, people outside the Deep South mostly knew what they’d seen on television.
Politicians like George Wallace had so effectively cultivated an atmosphere in which whites were superior, and in which blacks were tolerated only as long as they accepted their inferior status, that the issue of race overshadowed everything else about the state.
It took a person like Vivian Malone, who would later marry and take the surname Jones, to show the nation that Alabama and Alabamians were better than their state’s ugly image.
She did it with her courage in becoming the first black graduate of the University of Alabama. She did it later in lectures, in her faith and in what she had to say about those dark days of long ago.
And she did it in her death last week at the age of 63, when the state and nation paused to grieve her passing and remember her accomplishments.
Yes, part of those remembrances is having to stare anew at the famous photograph of Wallace’s “stand in the schoolhouse door.” But recalling the evils of prejudice, segregation and demagoguery can be curative if they help us resolve that our state and country will never again fall prey to them.
Besides, grim though it is, the picture inspires fresh awe at the bravery of a 21-year-old woman who risked being beaten, spat upon, even killed so she could attend the state university – a privilege taken for granted by whites.
Would you or I have had that kind of nerve at that tender age? Could any of us muster that kind of nerve now?
And could any of us do what Vivian Malone Jones did years afterward?
She could have let herself be consumed by the evil that swirled around her. She could have wallowed in resentment for having had to take on the sins of segregation, and for having been an innocent pawn in the politics of the era.
In particular, she could have hated George Wallace with all her heart, her soul, her being.
But she refused to become a victim. She accepted her role as a pioneer, graduated from the university, enjoyed a career in the federal government and attended the University of Alabama’s 40th anniversary celebration of its integration.
And she forgave – not just the university and her fellow Alabamians, but the ex-governor himself.
“Only the brave know how to forgive,” wrote the 19th century novelist Laurence Sterne. “A coward never forgave; it is not in his nature.”
A brave Vivian Malone Jones learned that bitterness doesn’t hurt the one toward whom it’s directed, but only the person who harbors it. She learned, and taught the rest of us, the futility of hate.
Frances Coleman is editorial page editor of the Mobile (Ala.) Register. She can be contacted at [email protected].
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