{"id":40894,"date":"2024-07-26T19:12:23","date_gmt":"2024-07-26T15:12:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/?p=40894"},"modified":"2024-07-26T19:12:23","modified_gmt":"2024-07-26T15:12:23","slug":"can-a-brush-with-death-change-politicians-it-did-for-notorious-alabama-segregationist-george-wallace","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/can-a-brush-with-death-change-politicians-it-did-for-notorious-alabama-segregationist-george-wallace\/","title":{"rendered":"Can a brush with death change politicians? It did for notorious Alabama segregationist George Wallace"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/span><\/h4>\n

<\/h4>\n

An assassin\u2019s bullet couldn\u2019t knock George Wallace out of politics \u2212 but it made him seek redemption.<\/span><\/h4>\n

Donald Trump\u2019s narrow escape from an assassin\u2019s bullet led me \u2013 a historian who has written about political polarization and the Civil Rights Movement \u2013 to think back to another norm-smashing populist who encountered death on the campaign trail: former Alabama governor and U.S. presidential candidate George Wallace.<\/span><\/p>\n

By 1972, Wallace\u2019s image was fixed in most Americans\u2019 minds as the face of the white South\u2019s violent response to the Civil Rights Movement. Wallace had skillfully deployed divisive, racially tinged attacks against liberals, government and protesters to become a serious contender for the presidency.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/span>Former Alabama governor and presidential candidate George Wallace speaks to reporters in Detroit on Oct. 29, 1968.\u00a0AP Photo\/Preston Stroup<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

So, Wallace turned heads when he publicly apologized and pleaded for forgiveness for his segregationist past after a 1972 assassination attempt at a campaign rally in Maryland left him paralyzed.<\/span><\/p>\n

Facing death and seeking redemption<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s impossible to look into Wallace\u2019s heart and understand what moved him. Yet three factors probably loomed large.<\/span><\/p>\n

First, the brush with death. It upended Wallace\u2019s life and forced him to end his 1972 bid for the presidency. It also left a pugnacious man who had been a boxer in his youth and was proud of his physical prowess bound to a wheelchair. He underwent frequent surgeries and lived in constant pain.<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s common for those who have faced death to reflect on their mortality and their life. Wallace was no exception.<\/span><\/p>\n

Religion also may have played a role. While he was an earthy, profane man who didn\u2019t resist temptations of the flesh, Wallace couldn\u2019t escape the religious views that he had imbibed as a child and that permeated Southern culture. Faced with his own mortality, he thought about the fate of his soul and sought redemption by accepting Jesus, repenting and seeking forgiveness.<\/span><\/p>\n

Less than a month after Wallace was shot, civil rights icon Shirley Chisholm visited him in his Maryland hospital room.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI wouldn\u2019t want what happened to you to happen to anyone,\u201d she told the governor.<\/span><\/p>\n

Wallace\u2019s daughter Peggy recalled that Chisholm\u2019s words brought her father to tears and he \u201cstarted to change.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

In 1974, Wallace professed his conversion in a speech at Jerry Falwell\u2019s Lynchburg, Virginia, megachurch. He told the congregation he had \u201cbeen through the valley of the shadow of death,\u201d and proclaimed, \u201cI am whole through the grace of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Wallace reached out to those he had wronged, including John Lewis, the civil rights leader whose skull had been broken by Wallace\u2019s state troopers in Selma in 1965. Lewis was moved by their 1979 encounter.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cDuring that meeting, I could tell that he was a changed man; he was engaged in a campaign to seek forgiveness from the same African-Americans he had oppressed,\u201d Lewis wrote for The New York Times in 1998. \u201cHe acknowledged his bigotry and assumed responsibility for the harm he had caused. He wanted to be forgiven.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Playing to voters<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Politics had been Wallace\u2019s life since he first won election to the Alabama Legislature in 1946. He could barely breathe without it, even after being nearly killed on the campaign trail.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t believe he needs a family,\u201d his second wife, Cornelia, commented in the midst of an acrimonious divorce in 1978. \u201cHe just needs an audience.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Wallace\u2019s segregationist persona was a product, apparently, of politics. As a college student and budding politician, he was progressive by Southern standards: He avoided race-baiting and called for greater support for public services that benefited working-class Alabamians.<\/span><\/p>\n

Years later, Ruth Johnson, whose husband, Frank, became a champion of civil rights as a federal judge, remembered Wallace as a college friend. \u201cWe were young and idealistic,\u201d Ruth recalled. \u201cAnd we loved George for his enthusiasms.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

In the late 1940s and 1950s, Wallace eschewed extremism. He refused to join the Dixiecrat rebellion against the Democratic Party\u2019s civil rights platform at the 1948 Democratic convention. And he had a reputation for dealing fairly with Black attorneys and plaintiffs during his years as a state judge.<\/span><\/p>\n

That changed after he lost the Democratic nomination for governor in 1958 to a rival who courted the Ku Klux Klan and openly appealed to white racism. With the South in flames as the Civil Rights Movement accelerated, Wallace won election in 1962 as a full-throated segregationist.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cSegregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever,\u201d he proclaimed in his 1963 inaugural address. Wallace physically confronted a US deputy attorney general and federal marshals as they attempted to enforce a court order admitting a Black woman to the University of Alabama.<\/span><\/p>\n

Going national<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Ambitious and sensing that racism wasn\u2019t limited to the South, Wallace entered three Democratic presidential primaries in 1964 during his first term as governor. Then, after leaving office in 1967, he launched an unsuccessful third-party bid for the presidency in 1968.<\/span><\/p>\n

He was re-elected governor in 1970 and then pursued the Democratic presidential nomination in 1972 until his near assassination. Despite his injuries, he remained in office, winning election to a third term and serving until 1979.<\/span><\/p>\n

In 1983, even as Wallace\u2019s physical and mental condition deteriorated, he won a fourth term as governor. Being in the limelight was \u201ca matter of life and death\u201d for him, a long-term adviser observed.<\/span><\/p>\n

The South had changed as a result of the movement Wallace fought so viciously, and Black people had become a major force in the Democratic Party. Ever the politician, Wallace changed too, appointing Black politicians to positions at all levels of his administration.<\/span><\/p>\n

Wallace wasn\u2019t a saint. Two marriages ended in divorce, in part because of his emotional abuse of his wives.<\/span><\/p>\n

Spike Lee\u2019s documentary \u201c4 Little Girls,\u201d which recounts white supremacists\u2019 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, that killed four Black children, features chilling interviews with Wallace. They reveal a man who treated Black people who worked for him in the 1980s in an embarrassingly patronizing manner.<\/span><\/p>\n

Still, Wallace reflected, repented and asked forgiveness. That\u2019s worth remembering at a time when many of us hope our leaders will become introspective and perhaps even change.<\/span><\/p>\n

Donald Nieman<\/span>
\n<\/strong>Professor of History and Provost Emeritus
\nBinghamton University
\nState University of New York<\/p>\n

\n

Mauritius Times ePaper Friday 26 July 2024<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An assassin\u2019s bullet couldn\u2019t knock George Wallace out of politics \u2212 but it made him seek redemption.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":139,"featured_media":40895,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8348],"tags":[44581,29183,47282,47281,2190,26165,74,15364,47280,25431,40727,27203],"class_list":["post-40894","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-conversation","tag-alabama","tag-assassination","tag-civil-right-movement","tag-george-wallace","tag-presidential-elections","tag-race","tag-racism","tag-religion","tag-repentance","tag-segregation","tag-us-history","tag-us-politics"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/07\/Former-Alabama-governor.jpg?fit=1200%2C827&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8QzSF-aDA","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40894","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/139"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40894"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40894\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/40895"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40894"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40894"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40894"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}