George Wallace’s stand in the hospital door: op-ed

This is a guest opinion column

Three years after blocking the door of Foster Auditorium on the University of Alabama campus to protest the admission of Black students, Governor George C. Wallace took another stand against racial equality in state institutions. On April 27, 1966, he ordered Alabama’s Mental Hospital Board to reverse their efforts to desegregate the state’s hospitals for the mentally ill. Earlier in the month, Superintendent James Tarwater and his staff had transferred thirty African American male patients from all-Black Searcy Hospital near Mobile to predominantly-white Bryce Hospital in Tuscaloosa, and thirty white female patients from Bryce to Searcy. In addition, Black patients who had been living in the “work wards” at the back of the Bryce property were brought into the main wards. Wallace threatened that, if the hospitals did not send the patients back immediately, he would have the highway patrol do it.