Out of fear for her safety, the university hired a driver for her, a student at Stillman College in Tuscaloosa named Mack Jones. She also worked at the Environmental Protection Agency as director of civil rights and urban affairs and director of environmental justice before retiring in 1996 to sell life insurance.In 1996, former Governor Wallace presented the Lurleen B. Wallace Award for Courage, named for his late wife, to Ms. Jones.
Congratulating Vivian Malone Jones, The University of Alabama’s first African-American graduate, on receiving an honorary doctorate of humane letters degree at UA’s summer commencement ceremony, are, from left, UA trustees James Loftin and John England, president Andrew Sorensen, and trustees Sandral Hullett and Cleophus Thomas, Jr. Jones was also the commencement speaker. Vivian Malone Jones, who has died after a stroke in Atlanta, Georgia, aged 63, came to public attention as one of the two black students whose enrolment at … She was survived by a son, a daughter, three grandchildren, four sisters and three brothers. "The Schoolhouse Door". Vivian Malone Jones. He told her that he made a mistake 33 years earlier and that he admired her. She and another black student did so with the help of a federal court order and a decision by the White House to protect the pair's rights with the help of National Guard troops on campus. Social Reformer. A district judge ruled in favor of the pair entering the university but was blocked by then-governor George Wallace in the infamous “Stand in the Schoolhouse Door” event. Her parents emphasized the importance of receiving an education and made sure that their children attended college. She was married to the late Dr. Mack Arthur Jones. Despite being an exceptional high school student and member of the National Honor Society, Ms. Malone Jones was one […] Her alma mater endowed a Vivian Malone Jones Scholarship Fund. Her parents both worked at Brookley Air Force Base; her father served in maintenance and her mother worked as a domestic servant. Vivian Malone Jones became the first African American to graduate from the formerly segregated University of Alabama on May 30, 1965. Civil rights pioneer. Along with another African American student, James Hood, Ms. Malone Jones and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund filed suit against UA for denying entry to Black students. Malone was born in Monroe County, Alabama in 1942, the fourth of eight children. 1942–2005. 175-176, 225-228. After much deliberation between the U.S. Malone attended Central High School, where she was a member of the In 1961, Malone had received word from a family friend that the local Black students who had applied to the university's branch campus in Mobile were investigated by the university's department of Public Safety, including Malone.Wallace had not only refused the order, but he interrupted Katzenbach; in front of the crowds of media crews surrounding him, Wallace delivered a short, symbolic speech concerning state sovereignty, claiming that After seeing that Wallace would not step aside, Katzenbach called upon the assistance of President Malone's time spent at the University of Alabama was relatively free of conflict and threats to her safety, with the exception of a spree of bombings that occurred in November 1963 by rioting whites possibly angry with the integration policy. “I decided not to show any fear and went to classes that day,” she said in an interview with The Post Standard of Syracuse in 2004. She earned a bachelor’s degree at Alabama A&M, a predominantly black university, but it lost its accreditation.