When Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) made a thinly veiled reference comparing Eric Holder to George Wallace before a group of conservatives, it may not have occurred him that the attorney general’s sister-in-law, Vivian Malone Jones, was one of the segregationist’s actual victims during the Jim Crow era.
“We’ve got Eric Holder and the Department of Justice trying to stand in the schoolhouse door to prevent minority kids, low-income kids, kids who haven’t had access to a great education, the chance to go to better schools,” Jindal told the crowd at the CPAC conference on Thursday.
It was an apparent reference to the “Stand in the Schoolhouse Door” protest in 1963, when Alabama Gov. George Wallace stood at the door, along with state troopers, to block the first two African-Americans from enrolling in the all-white University of Alabama. One of them was Jones.
Jones eventually did enroll and went on to become the university’s first black graduate. She died in 2005 at the age of 63.
