Archie Wade, University of Alabama’s First Black Faculty Member, Dies at 85 A leader on the front lines of the civil-rights movement, he was stoic in the face of dehumanizing behavior, but felt it all

Black football fans had previously been confined to a small set of bleachers in the end zone of what is now known as Bryant-Denny Stadium, without much of a view of the field. Whisenton said that he, Wade and Howard had been given tickets by a friend, David Mathews—an administrator who would become president of the university in 1969.

There had been no public announcement that Black fans would be sitting with white fans at the game. “The whole idea was to make this as normal as possible,” said Mathews, “not to make it an in-your-face demonstration of integration.”

For much of the first half, their presence in the stands went mostly unnoticed. But when the band got up to take the field for halftime, the three men were exposed. Profanities, ice, cups and worse were hurled in their direction.

“I can [still] feel that empty whiskey bottle go by my right ear,” Whisenton said in a recent interview.

They left before things got worse, but their mark on the university was just beginning.

Within less than a decade, Whisenton became the first Black student to receive a Ph.D. from the university and Wade, who died Jan. 13 at the age of 85, became its first Black faculty member. Getting the job, though, was just one of many hurdles in doing the job.

“There were times that I felt like I was doing some things that I should be doing, not only for my race, but for the university, and for everybody else,” Wade said years later. “Then there were times I felt like, I don’t want to go back out there. It’s not worth it. But every night…I’d always think, well, tomorrow’s tomorrow, and tomorrow will be a better day.”

‘They were our Kennedys’

Archie Wade, right, with his siblings. Photo: Wade family

Archie Wade was born in Big Cove, Ala., on Oct. 2, 1939, the eldest of Robert and Ella Wade’s seven children. When he was in high school, the family settled in Tuscaloosa, where they became pillars of the community.

“To those of us who lived in McKenzie Court, my all-Black housing project, they were our Kennedys,” the late journalist George Curry wrote after Robert Wade’s death. “They were royalty and we wanted to be like them.”

Robert Wade owned a print shop that was a gathering place for neighbors to talk, play dominoes and checkers. It was also a place where local children could come for some fathering.

“A lot of the people we grew up with did not have two parents in their homes, and most of them were raised by their mothers,” Archie Wade’s sister, Phyllis Odom, said. “And, so, a lot of them considered my dad their dad. They could always come to our house and eat and visit with us, and my dad would round up the neighborhood to take them to church.”

The children in the neighborhood looked up to Archie, too. He was a standout baseball player, good in school, took his faith seriously and lived the straight and narrow—“he didn’t know what beer tastes like,” one childhood neighbor and lifelong friend, Eddie Sherrod, remembered.

After high school, Wade received an athletic scholarship at Stillman College, a historically Black college in Tuscaloosa, where he played baseball, basketball and tennis. At Stillman, Joffre Whisenton was both his coach and mentor. After graduation, he went to work with Whisenton coaching basketball and baseball and teaching physical education, while earning a master’s degree from West Virginia University.

At Stillman, he met his wife, Jacqueline Wade. She survives him, along with their five children.

As newlyweds, the couple moved in next door to his parents. Like his father, Wade became known throughout the neighborhood as someone who could fix anything—cars, plumbing, air conditioners—and was willing to help anyone.

Wade played three seasons of minor-league baseball. Photo: Wade family

Coaching baseball at Stillman, he caught the eye of a major league scout while he was taking ground balls at third base one day and was signed by the St. Louis Cardinals’ organization. He played three seasons in the team’s minor league system, including on now-legendary manager Sparky Anderson’s minor league team in Florida—the St. Petersburg Cardinals. In 1966, the team played a 29-inning game—he played center field, was the leadoff hitter and picked up two hits in 12 at-bats—which set the record for the longest game in professional baseball history. (The record was broken in 1981.)

‘I’ll pray every day’

After Mathews became president of the University of Alabama and was looking to integrate the faculty’s ranks, Whisenton recommended Wade. In 1970, he was hired to teach in what is now known as the department of kinesiology. A significant percentage of the university’s students and faculty weren’t pleased. There were faculty members who would turn around and go the other way if they saw Wade walking toward them, Wade told the Birmingham Times in 2021.