Okla-homey
1/14/2007, 08:34 AM
Jan 14, 1963: George Wallace inaugurated as Alabama governor
http://img214.imageshack.us/img214/1478/aaaaaaaaaaaageorgewallaue7.jpg (http://imageshack.us)
George C. Wallace. easily one of the most controversial political figures in US history
44 years ago on this day, George Wallace was inaugurated to his first term as the governor of Alabama, promising his followers,
"Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!"
His inauguration speech was written by Ku Klux Klan leader Asa Carter, who, BTW, later reformed his white supremacist beliefs and wrote The Education of Little Tree under the pseudonym of Forrest Carter. The book, which gives a fictitious account of Carter's upbringing by a Scotch-Irish moonshiner and a Cherokee grandmother, poignantly describes the difficulties faced by Indians in American society.
George Wallace's ideological journey was not unlike Asa Carter's in that Wallace's early public life prominently featured staunch segregationism and later moderated into a public position favoring integration and reconciliation.
Wallace spent his later years championing black voting rights. He appointed black officials to state offices in his final term as governor, beginning in 1982, and insisted that he was "rehabilitated," as he put it. But his legacy will always pivot on a single quote and a single image from the bitter civil rights battles of the 1960s.
Before bursting on the national scene, little is known about the facts of Wallace's career: his early days as an amateur boxer, his stint as a Army sergeant in World War II, his time as a county judge.
Wallaces' first foray into statewide politics was in 1958 when he made his first bid for Alabama's gubernatorial seat. The NAACP endorsed him while the KKK endorsed his opponent in the primary.
During that failed campaign, he stated:
"During the next four years, many problems will arise in the matter of segregation and civil rights, as a result of judicial decisions. Having served as judge of the third judicial circuit of Alabama, I feel, my friends, that this judicial experience, will be invaluable to me as your governor.… And I want to tell the good people of this state, as a judge of the third judicial circuit, if I didn’t have what it took to treat a man fair, regardless of his color, then I don’t have what it takes to be the governor of your great state."
"I advocate hatred of no man, because hate will only compound the problems facing the South."
He was defeated by a wide margin. Wallace learned his lesson and vowed (said in private to Seymore Trammell, Wallace's finance director, following his unsuccessful first run for governor against John Patterson):
"I was out-n---red, and I will never be out-n---red again."
Four years later, Wallace transformed himself into a fiery segregationist and won election to the governor's office in a landslide victory. He promised "segregation forever" but buckled under federal opposition.
http://img214.imageshack.us/img214/9554/aaaaaaaaaaa110163092740fg4.jpg (http://imageshack.us)
In June 1963, under federal pressure, he was forced to end his literal blockade of the University of Alabama and allow the enrollment of black students. While blocking the symbolic school house door he proclaimed:
"The unwelcomed, unwanted, unwarranted, and force-induced intrusion upon the campus of the University of Alabama today of the might of the central government offers frightful example of the oppression of the rights, privileges and sovereignty of this state by officers of the federal government."
http://img214.imageshack.us/img214/4392/aaaaaaaaaabr0174asee8.jpg (http://imageshack.us)
Gov. Wallace symbolically blocking the schoolhouse door in Tuscaloosa
Despite his failures in slowing the accelerating civil rights movement in the South, Wallace became a national spokesman for resistance to racial change and in 1964 entered the race for the U.S. presidency.
http://img214.imageshack.us/img214/1407/aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaawallaz1.jpg (http://imageshack.us)
A hero to some, but often pilloried by the press
http://img218.imageshack.us/img218/4425/aaaaaaaaaafamilypy4.jpg (http://imageshack.us)
Wallace's family. Lurleen Wallace shown with children George Jr., Bobbi Jo, Peggy Sue, and infant daughter Janie Lee. In 1986 and 1990, George Jr. was elected as State Treasurer of Alabama. In November 1998, George Jr. was elected to the Alabama Public Service Commission, where he served as Commissioner. He ran for Lt. Governor of Alabama in 2006 but lost. Senator John McCain of Arizona, a potential candidate for president in 2008, made appearances on Wallace's behalf. Wallace believes his political career may be over due to the defeat.
Although defeated in most Democratic presidential primaries he entered, his modest successes demonstrated the extent of popular backlash against integration.
Interestingly, in 1966, after failing to get the legislature to amend the Alabama constitution to allow governors to serve consecutive terms, George announced the candidacy of his wife Lurleen for governor. The couple admitted frankly that if Lurleen was elected, George would continue to make the administrative policies and decisions. Mrs. Wallace won the May Democratic primary with 54 percent of the vote which assured her election in November.
http://img214.imageshack.us/img214/653/aaaaaaaaaaaasittingdf6.jpg (http://imageshack.us)
Lurleen Wallace served as Alabama's first female governor, but succumbed to cancer in 1968. As First Lady and while Governor, she advanced the cause of the mentally handicapped in Alabama by overseeing the revampment of horrid conditions in the state's facilities for the retarded and mentally ill.
In 1968, Wallace made another strong run as the candidate of the American Independent Party and managed to get on the ballot in all 50 states. On Election Day, he drew 10 million votes from across the country.
http://aycu21.webshots.com/image/8380/2000569267680347619_rs.jpg (http://allyoucanupload.webshots.com/v/2000569267680347619)
Percentage of the popular vote Wallace netted in 1968.
In 1972, Governor Wallace returned to the Democratic Party for his third presidential campaign and, under a slightly more moderate platform, was showing promising returns when Arthur Bremer shot him on May 15, 1972.
http://img218.imageshack.us/img218/9120/aaaaaaaaaadc04zv2.jpg (http://imageshack.us)
Three others were wounded in Bremer's attack on a Wallace rally in Maryland, and Wallace was permanently paralyzed from the waist down. The next day, while fighting for his life in a hospital, he won major primary victories in Michigan and Maryland. However, Wallace remained in the hospital for several months, bringing his third presidential campaign to an irrevocable end.
After his recovery, he faded from national prominence and made a poor showing in his fourth and final presidential campaign in 1979. During the 1980s, Wallace's politics shifted dramatically, especially in regard to race.
He contacted civil rights leaders he had so forcibly opposed in the past and asked their forgiveness. In time, he gained the political support of Alabama's growing black electorate and in 1983 was elected Alabama governor for the last time with their overwhelming support.
During the next four years, the man who had promised "segregation forever" made more black political appointments than any other figure in Alabama history.
In the late ’80s, he told Stephan Lesher,
"I don’t expect people to forget my brash words or deeds. But I ask that they try to remember the actions that I took that were designed to help them."
http://img214.imageshack.us/img214/2339/aaaaaaaaaaphotowallacetf2.jpg (http://imageshack.us)
Wallace late in his life.
He announced his retirement in 1986, telling the Alabama electorate in a tearful address that "I've climbed my last political mountain, but there are still some personal hills I must climb. But for now, I must pass the rope and the pick to another climber and say climb on, climb on to higher heights. Climb on 'til you reach the very peak. Then look back and wave at me. I, too, will still be climbing."
He died in 1998 and was given a state funeral. Hundreds of thousands of Alabamans took the time to file past and pay their respects as he lay in state in the Alabama capitol.
Postscript
While living in Montgomery in the early '00's, your correspondent became acquainted with the man who served at Wallace's chief of staff during Wallace's final stint as Alabama's governor. My friend convinced me that Wallace actually had recanted his racist past, and for that matter, never really believed the fiery segregationist vitriole he spewed earlier.
Instead, my friend said Wallace did so because he knew that sort of thing was required to get elected to statewide office in Alabama during that period of the state's history. Wallace, the consumate Alabama politician, jettisoned the segregationist stuff when it became a political liability, and sincerely tried to make amends with Alabama's black folks. To my continuing amazement, there is ample and conclusive evidence, they did forgive him.
Regardless of your personal opinion of George Wallace, he was a fascinating 20th century American political figure. If you would like to learn more about him, I would like to recommend "Settin' The Woods on Fire" a video program widely available thru your local PBS affiliate.
You can pick one up at the following linky:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/wallace/filmmore/index.html
http://img213.imageshack.us/img213/2498/insane7zouj9.jpg
http://img214.imageshack.us/img214/1478/aaaaaaaaaaaageorgewallaue7.jpg (http://imageshack.us)
George C. Wallace. easily one of the most controversial political figures in US history
44 years ago on this day, George Wallace was inaugurated to his first term as the governor of Alabama, promising his followers,
"Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!"
His inauguration speech was written by Ku Klux Klan leader Asa Carter, who, BTW, later reformed his white supremacist beliefs and wrote The Education of Little Tree under the pseudonym of Forrest Carter. The book, which gives a fictitious account of Carter's upbringing by a Scotch-Irish moonshiner and a Cherokee grandmother, poignantly describes the difficulties faced by Indians in American society.
George Wallace's ideological journey was not unlike Asa Carter's in that Wallace's early public life prominently featured staunch segregationism and later moderated into a public position favoring integration and reconciliation.
Wallace spent his later years championing black voting rights. He appointed black officials to state offices in his final term as governor, beginning in 1982, and insisted that he was "rehabilitated," as he put it. But his legacy will always pivot on a single quote and a single image from the bitter civil rights battles of the 1960s.
Before bursting on the national scene, little is known about the facts of Wallace's career: his early days as an amateur boxer, his stint as a Army sergeant in World War II, his time as a county judge.
Wallaces' first foray into statewide politics was in 1958 when he made his first bid for Alabama's gubernatorial seat. The NAACP endorsed him while the KKK endorsed his opponent in the primary.
During that failed campaign, he stated:
"During the next four years, many problems will arise in the matter of segregation and civil rights, as a result of judicial decisions. Having served as judge of the third judicial circuit of Alabama, I feel, my friends, that this judicial experience, will be invaluable to me as your governor.… And I want to tell the good people of this state, as a judge of the third judicial circuit, if I didn’t have what it took to treat a man fair, regardless of his color, then I don’t have what it takes to be the governor of your great state."
"I advocate hatred of no man, because hate will only compound the problems facing the South."
He was defeated by a wide margin. Wallace learned his lesson and vowed (said in private to Seymore Trammell, Wallace's finance director, following his unsuccessful first run for governor against John Patterson):
"I was out-n---red, and I will never be out-n---red again."
Four years later, Wallace transformed himself into a fiery segregationist and won election to the governor's office in a landslide victory. He promised "segregation forever" but buckled under federal opposition.
http://img214.imageshack.us/img214/9554/aaaaaaaaaaa110163092740fg4.jpg (http://imageshack.us)
In June 1963, under federal pressure, he was forced to end his literal blockade of the University of Alabama and allow the enrollment of black students. While blocking the symbolic school house door he proclaimed:
"The unwelcomed, unwanted, unwarranted, and force-induced intrusion upon the campus of the University of Alabama today of the might of the central government offers frightful example of the oppression of the rights, privileges and sovereignty of this state by officers of the federal government."
http://img214.imageshack.us/img214/4392/aaaaaaaaaabr0174asee8.jpg (http://imageshack.us)
Gov. Wallace symbolically blocking the schoolhouse door in Tuscaloosa
Despite his failures in slowing the accelerating civil rights movement in the South, Wallace became a national spokesman for resistance to racial change and in 1964 entered the race for the U.S. presidency.
http://img214.imageshack.us/img214/1407/aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaawallaz1.jpg (http://imageshack.us)
A hero to some, but often pilloried by the press
http://img218.imageshack.us/img218/4425/aaaaaaaaaafamilypy4.jpg (http://imageshack.us)
Wallace's family. Lurleen Wallace shown with children George Jr., Bobbi Jo, Peggy Sue, and infant daughter Janie Lee. In 1986 and 1990, George Jr. was elected as State Treasurer of Alabama. In November 1998, George Jr. was elected to the Alabama Public Service Commission, where he served as Commissioner. He ran for Lt. Governor of Alabama in 2006 but lost. Senator John McCain of Arizona, a potential candidate for president in 2008, made appearances on Wallace's behalf. Wallace believes his political career may be over due to the defeat.
Although defeated in most Democratic presidential primaries he entered, his modest successes demonstrated the extent of popular backlash against integration.
Interestingly, in 1966, after failing to get the legislature to amend the Alabama constitution to allow governors to serve consecutive terms, George announced the candidacy of his wife Lurleen for governor. The couple admitted frankly that if Lurleen was elected, George would continue to make the administrative policies and decisions. Mrs. Wallace won the May Democratic primary with 54 percent of the vote which assured her election in November.
http://img214.imageshack.us/img214/653/aaaaaaaaaaaasittingdf6.jpg (http://imageshack.us)
Lurleen Wallace served as Alabama's first female governor, but succumbed to cancer in 1968. As First Lady and while Governor, she advanced the cause of the mentally handicapped in Alabama by overseeing the revampment of horrid conditions in the state's facilities for the retarded and mentally ill.
In 1968, Wallace made another strong run as the candidate of the American Independent Party and managed to get on the ballot in all 50 states. On Election Day, he drew 10 million votes from across the country.
http://aycu21.webshots.com/image/8380/2000569267680347619_rs.jpg (http://allyoucanupload.webshots.com/v/2000569267680347619)
Percentage of the popular vote Wallace netted in 1968.
In 1972, Governor Wallace returned to the Democratic Party for his third presidential campaign and, under a slightly more moderate platform, was showing promising returns when Arthur Bremer shot him on May 15, 1972.
http://img218.imageshack.us/img218/9120/aaaaaaaaaadc04zv2.jpg (http://imageshack.us)
Three others were wounded in Bremer's attack on a Wallace rally in Maryland, and Wallace was permanently paralyzed from the waist down. The next day, while fighting for his life in a hospital, he won major primary victories in Michigan and Maryland. However, Wallace remained in the hospital for several months, bringing his third presidential campaign to an irrevocable end.
After his recovery, he faded from national prominence and made a poor showing in his fourth and final presidential campaign in 1979. During the 1980s, Wallace's politics shifted dramatically, especially in regard to race.
He contacted civil rights leaders he had so forcibly opposed in the past and asked their forgiveness. In time, he gained the political support of Alabama's growing black electorate and in 1983 was elected Alabama governor for the last time with their overwhelming support.
During the next four years, the man who had promised "segregation forever" made more black political appointments than any other figure in Alabama history.
In the late ’80s, he told Stephan Lesher,
"I don’t expect people to forget my brash words or deeds. But I ask that they try to remember the actions that I took that were designed to help them."
http://img214.imageshack.us/img214/2339/aaaaaaaaaaphotowallacetf2.jpg (http://imageshack.us)
Wallace late in his life.
He announced his retirement in 1986, telling the Alabama electorate in a tearful address that "I've climbed my last political mountain, but there are still some personal hills I must climb. But for now, I must pass the rope and the pick to another climber and say climb on, climb on to higher heights. Climb on 'til you reach the very peak. Then look back and wave at me. I, too, will still be climbing."
He died in 1998 and was given a state funeral. Hundreds of thousands of Alabamans took the time to file past and pay their respects as he lay in state in the Alabama capitol.
Postscript
While living in Montgomery in the early '00's, your correspondent became acquainted with the man who served at Wallace's chief of staff during Wallace's final stint as Alabama's governor. My friend convinced me that Wallace actually had recanted his racist past, and for that matter, never really believed the fiery segregationist vitriole he spewed earlier.
Instead, my friend said Wallace did so because he knew that sort of thing was required to get elected to statewide office in Alabama during that period of the state's history. Wallace, the consumate Alabama politician, jettisoned the segregationist stuff when it became a political liability, and sincerely tried to make amends with Alabama's black folks. To my continuing amazement, there is ample and conclusive evidence, they did forgive him.
Regardless of your personal opinion of George Wallace, he was a fascinating 20th century American political figure. If you would like to learn more about him, I would like to recommend "Settin' The Woods on Fire" a video program widely available thru your local PBS affiliate.
You can pick one up at the following linky:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/wallace/filmmore/index.html
http://img213.imageshack.us/img213/2498/insane7zouj9.jpg