Henry Graham; Face-Off With Alabama Gov. Wallace Made Civil Rights History

At precisely 3:30 in the afternoon of June 12, 1963, Gen. Henry Vance Graham walked up to the entrance of Foster Auditorium on the Tuscaloosa campus of the University of Alabama.

He offered a crisp salute to the governor of Alabama, George Corley Wallace, who was standing in the doorway in an effort to block the admission of two black students, James Hood and Vivian Malone, to the university. Wallace returned the salute.

Graham, dressed in combat fatigues with the Stars and Bars flag of the 31st Dixie Division of the Alabama National Guard stitched on his breast pocket, spoke first.

“It is my sad duty to ask you to step aside,” he said, “on order of the president of the United States.”

Wallace, who had opposed all federal efforts to integrate the university, including an in-person bid that morning by a Justice Department official, replied, “General, I want to make a statement.”

“Certainly, sir,” Graham said as he moved away.

Wallace spoke briefly, urging the citizens of Alabama to remain “calm and restrained” in this fight against “federal interference” in what he believed to be Alabama’s internal affairs.

He then said he would return to Montgomery, the state capital, “to continue working for constitutional government to benefit all Alabamians--black and white.”

Wallace and his entourage then left for waiting cars.

The entire confrontation on the stiflingly hot afternoon lasted less than five minutes, but it marked a milestone in the civil rights movement.

In his book on the efforts to integrate the university, “The Schoolhouse Door: Segregation’s Last Stand at the University of Alabama,” E. Culpepper Clark writes that Graham, who died March 21 at 82 of complications of Parkinson’s disease, was a man of moderate disposition who had the commanding but not overbearing presence of a military man. It was his disposition as much as anything else that made him the choice of federal officials intent on enforcing integration.

Graham’s military career started in 1934 at the age of 18 when he joined the National Guard. He served in the U.S. Army in two wars, advancing to brigadier general during the African, Italian and French campaigns of World War II.

He later said he regretted not having led a brigade in combat, but he earned several decorations, including a Legion of Merit, the Bronze Star with Oak Leaf Cluster and Bronze Arrowhead, for being among the invasion forces of Europe on D-Day. In the early 1950s, he served in the Korean War.

After the wars, he returned to his native Birmingham and began a career in real estate, but he remained in the National Guard. It was in that capacity, when his unit was put under federal control, that he played several key roles in the civil rights movement.

In 1961, Graham commanded a National Guard force that helped to avert violence by calming an angry white mob when Freedom Riders arrived at the bus station in Montgomery.

He also was present in 1965 when a force of National Guardsmen escorted voting-rights marchers from Selma to Montgomery.

But it was on the Tuscaloosa campus of the University of Alabama in the presence of scores of troops, police and reporters that Graham was perhaps best remembered.

In his race to become Alabama’s governor, Wallace had vowed to stand in the schoolhouse door to bar black children and had ended his inaugural address by saying:

“In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this Earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss a gauntlet before the feet of tyranny. And I say: Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!”

According to Clark’s book, Graham did not welcome the idea of forcefully removing Wallace from the door to enforce a federal court decision ordering integration. He worried that if it came to that, his business career probably would be hurt beyond repair.

Nonetheless he understood his duty. Fortunately, Graham and an aide to Wallace, Gen. Taylor Hardin, worked out an arrangement in advance by which Wallace would step aside peacefully if he was allowed to make a statement.

On the morning of June 12, Wallace had barred Nicholas Katzenbach, an assistant U.S. attorney general, from taking Malone and Hood into Foster Auditorium, a multipurpose facility that was being used for summer school registration. It had been decided in advance to enroll the two students the day after the majority of summer school students had registered.

Graham sent 100 guardsmen to the campus on the theory that overwhelming force would intimidate the crowd. Wallace had his own force of state policemen, highway patrolmen and local sheriffs on the campus as well.

It was in that atmosphere that Graham and Wallace had their brief but historic encounter. When it was over, the registration had taken less than 15 minutes, but had had a surreal quality in the nearly empty auditorium. Hood and Malone were escorted to single dorm rooms.

That night, Graham slept on a sofa in the lobby of the dorm.

Hood, now a member of the academic staff at Madison Area Technical College in Madison, Wis., offered an anecdote about Graham to Time magazine:

“A small-statured military man knocked at my door at the University of Alabama,” Hood said. “He announced himself to be Henry Graham.

“ ‘I just came by to see who it was that had brought me down here to this hot-as-hell, God-awful place because he or she wanted to go to school,’ ” Hood recalled Graham saying.

“I’ll never forget it,” Hood said. “Here was the guy in charge--a key player in the historic drama--bothering to take the time to chat, to see how I was doing.

“Before he finished this, the first of several visits, he shared a quote from Mark Twain with me: ‘Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.’ He had a profound impact on my life then, as now.”

The buoyant mood of people favoring integration did not last long, however. Hood and Malone awoke the next morning to the news that civil rights leader Medgar Evers had been shot to death by a sniper in Mississippi after attending a rally at a church.

Graham retired from the National Guard in 1970 with the rank of major general. In the late ‘70s, he started his own real estate firm in Birmingham. Ten years later, Graham, then a leader of the Birmingham Rotary Club, helped set up a fund-raising effort in the Handsworth area of Birmingham, England, which was then coming to terms with integration.

In commenting on Graham’s death in his hometown, the Birmingham Post Herald wrote:

“While the state’s political leaders stirred up the passions of the mob--either not realizing or not caring about the harm that would result--Graham stood true to his oath to abide by the Constitution and the law. He carried out his duties and responsibilities even as top elected officials avoided them.

“Gen. Henry Graham’s conduct in those difficult days serves as a model for all who believe that honor, duty and integrity can and should be guiding principles in conducting one’s life. He was a good man who served the people of his state and nation well.”