Military planned Alabama invasion

Newly obtained documents reveal that the federal government quietly prepared to take over Alabama with thousands of troops in 1963 as violent civil rights resistance loomed.
Sunday, October 24, 2004

By COKE ELLINGTON
For the Mobile Register

MONTGOMERY -- In the weeks before Gov. George Wallace's attempt to block enrollment of two black students at the University of Alabama, the Kennedy administration was poised to send more than 20,000 troops into Alabama if resistance to integration had become more violent, according to declassified documents and interviews with former military and civilian sources.

The contingency plan was drawn up after a University of Mississippi desegregation riot in 1962 and in advance of Wallace's June 1963 stand in the schoolhouse door at Tuscaloosa, Ala.