And the fact that he could use segregation as an opportunity made him even more evil.”īorn in Clio, Alabama, in 1919, Wallace grew up poor in rural Barbour County. “When I was growing up in Alabama, George Wallace was considered the devil,” says Maurice Hobson, a historian at Georgia State University, where he specializes in African American studies. (Civil rights icon John Lewis, for his part, publicly forgave Wallace in a 1998 New York Times op-ed.) But others see Wallace as an irredeemable villain. Some observers say the governor deserves forgiveness because he made amends with the very people he had wronged. Instead of ascending to the United States’ highest office, Wallace continued his career in state politics-and, in an unexpected turn of events, spent his remaining years seeking forgiveness from the Black community for the hatred and division he’d sown at the height of the civil rights movement.įifty years after his shooting, Wallace’s tangled legacy remains the subject of intense debate. Chronic pain and complications stemming from the shooting prevented him from fulfilling his presidential ambitions, though he did mount a final bid for the nomination in 1976. Shot five times, Wallace was paralyzed from the waist down. The attack marked a turning point in the life of America’s most notorious segregationist, a man who had sent armed state troopers to attack civil rights marchers and ordered police to close down the state’s public schools rather than submit to federally ordered integration. “It sounds terrible to say, but it was almost a relief when it happened.

“You knew it was probably going to happen at some point, but you pray every day that it doesn’t,” says Wallace’s daughter Peggy Wallace Kennedy, who was 22 years old at the time of the shooting. Shocked onlookers crowded around as reporters began relaying news of the assassination attempt across the nation. Two men seized the shooter, a fame-seeking loner from Milwaukee named Arthur Bremer. His second wife, Cornelia, threw herself over his bloody body. The governor grabbed his stomach and fell to the ground. He fired up the crowd by railing against busing and the elite, continuing his long-standing tactic of stirring up fears among “forgotten” white Americans.Īs Wallace shook hands with attendees after the speech, gunshots rang out, and screams filled the parking lot. The governor of Alabama and an ardent segregationist, George Wallace was in Laurel, Maryland, campaigning to become the Democratic nominee for president. once called the “most dangerous racist in America” stepped up to the podium at a suburban Washington, D.C. On May 15, 1972, the man Martin Luther King Jr.

The Politics of Rage by Dan T. Carter