Four decades after becoming the first black faculty member at The University of Alabama, Archie Wade, a former professor of kinesiology, was honored Tuesday with a commemorative plaque as part of the University’s Through the Doors initative, a year-long celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Capstone’s integration.
After receiving recognition from James E. McLean, dean emeritus in the College of Education, and invitations from Marcus Cotton, vice president of the Black Faculty and Staff Association and Aaron Fowler, vice president of 100 Black Men of West Alabama, to join their organizations, Wade addressed the audience with tears in his eyes.
“I just wanna let you know that everything is okay,” Wade said. “Life has been ups and downs, there have been peaks and valleys: Today is a peak.”
Years before coming to the University in 1970 Wade, like many black people in the 1940s and 50s, was chopping cotton in 90 degree weather from sunup until sundown, making at most $2 or $3 each day.
After that, he rode to a segregated elementary school on a bus handed down from the white schools with no seats and wooden panels replacing the windows.
In high school he developed an interest in sports and, when Jackie Robinson became the first black athlete to play in Major League Baseball in 1947, it marked a pivotal turning point in Wade’s life.
“I guess that was the first time ever, in any kind of way, where I wanted to see or hear a baseball game, because he was playing,” Wade told Matt Curtner-Smith, professor and department head in the department of kinesiology.
Wade was inspired by Robinson to break color barriers around him. After graduating from Stillman University, Wade went on to play minor league baseball. In 1964 Frank Rose, former UA president, selected Wade and two others to integrate football stands. Wade said fans threw ice and soda bottles at him and he left the game early.
“They didn’t tell you the bad stuff; they didn’t wanna poison your mind about how some people are,” Conrad Whisenton, 56, a friend of Wade’s whose father was the first black doctoral student at the University, said. “But I remember I overheard [my father] tell somebody when we moved here in ’56 or ’57, he said, ‘[you’re] talking about going here? They won’t let [black people] drive through campus.’”
Despite his experience at the football game, Wade later accepted the offer to break another color barrier and join the UA faculty.
“Somehow certain people are put in certain places,” Whisenton said. “His temperament, his character… this was meant for him.”
Wade said he was not intimidated by his bad experiences; he only wanted to return to the field of education.
“You know how you feel sometimes no matter what you go through during the day, at the end of the day you can go home,” Wade said. “This is home. It’s not like a foreign place where people don’t know me. I think the fact that it was in Tuscaloosa made a great difference in me deciding to come back.”
Still, Wade faced prejudice in the beginning years at the University.
“I think people sort of tolerated me, not really accepted me,” Wade said. “There were people who’d act as if they didn’t see me or something to that effect. You know, if I missed a faculty meeting, they’d notice, even if there may have been 100 others. I accepted that because I knew it was gonna be like that. I expected those things and I think over the years I gained the respect in what I was doing.”
Wade’s sister-in-law, Glen Wade, said for Archie it has been a matter of doing what he can do.
“I don’t really think he thought about the impact of what he’s accomplished until he started being recognized,” she said. “I think this is the crowning jewel of his career.”
