SYMHC Classics: George Wallace

This 2016 episode covers George Wallace, one of the most prominent voices against the Civil Rights Movement and its objectives. He spent multiple campaigns for both governor and president on an explicitly pro-segregation platform.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. This week, when we talked about the Camden
twenty eight we mentioned that there was a George Wallace
campaign rally during that trial. Today, George Wallace is better
known for his time as governor of Alabama, but at
the time he was running for president. Our episode on
George Wallace originally came out on November twenty ninth, twenty sixteen,

(00:24):
and it is Today's Saturday Classic. Welcome to Stuff You
Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and
Welcome to the podcast. I'm Tray CV Wilson, and I'm
Holly Frye. Over the past few years, Holly, you and

(00:46):
I have talked about a number of prominent figures and
moments in the civil rights movement. That is correct. So
we've talked about people like Rosa Parks and bired Rustin,
and we've talked about Supreme Court decisions like Brown versus
Board and Loving versus for Time, organizations like the Brotherhood
of Sleeping Car Porters. But other than talking sort of

(01:07):
obliquely about the laws and practices and social systems that
have enforced segregation and discrimination in the United States, as
well as talking about some specific incidents of racist violence
like the destruction of the Greenwood District in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
We've never really talked a lot about the opposition to

(01:28):
that movement, So today we are talking about one of
the most prominent voices against the civil rights movement and
its objectives, Alabama Governor George Wallace, who spent multiple campaigns
to both governor and president on an explicitly pro segregation platform.
In his nineteen sixty three inaugural addresses Governor of Alabama,
he famously proclaimed segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever. So

(01:54):
we're going to be talking about violent retaliation against the
civil rights civil rights movement that happened during his terms
in office. And we're also going to be talking a
lot about his first wife, Lurline. He was married other times,
so we're not really getting into that at all, but
are going to talk about Lurline, whose own story is
both tied directly to her husband's political career and includes

(02:18):
a pretty disturbing account of medical neglect. So George Corley Wallace,
Junior was born on August twenty fifth of nineteen nineteen
in southeastern Alabama, where his father was a farmer. His
political career started very early, at the age of fifteen,
when he served as a government page at the Alabama
State Capitol and made up his mind to return one

(02:41):
day as governor. In his high school years, he was
also a boxer, winning two state titles in that sport.
Wallace studied at the University of Alabama, paying his tuition
by waiting tables and boxing. He graduated in nineteen thirty
seven and then finished his law degree in nineteen forty two.
That same year, at the age of twenty four, he

(03:01):
met Lurline Burns, who was then sixteen, while she was
working at a five and dime in Tuscaloosa. She had
graduated from high school early, and she was working there
to try to save up money to go to nursing school.
George was already very interested in politics, something that didn't
really interest Lurline at all, but they quickly became inseparable.
Not long after they met, Wallace was inducted into the

(03:24):
US Army Air Corps to serve in World War Two.
He and Lerleine got married on May twenty first of
nineteen forty three, while he was on leave after having
contracted meningitis. They spent their honeymoon in a friend's guest room.
Although George spent a lot of his time out talking politics.
While he was still stateside, Leerleine traveled back and forth

(03:45):
between her parents' home in Alabama and the air bases
where he was stationed. This included a trip to New Mexico,
which she made with their five month old daughter, Bobby Joe,
only to find that George had not arranged housing for
them on the base. They wound up needing to stay
in a converted chicken. Soon a Georgia b stationed in
the Pacific, where he flew incendiary missions over Japan until

(04:06):
being medically discharged for severe anxiety in nineteen forty five.
In nineteen forty six, he started actively pursuing a political career.
He became assistant to the state attorney General, and in
nineteen forty seven he was elected to the Alabama State
Legislature as representative for the first of his two terms.
During his campaign, Lerlin was the family's sole breadwinner. He

(04:30):
was elected a judge for the Third Judicial Court in
nineteen fifty three, a position that he retained until nineteen
fifty eight, and this job came with enough income for
him to buy a home for the family. Up until
this point, they had been living in a variety of
rented rooms and garage apartments, and his nickname became Fighting

(04:50):
Little Judge, both for his toughness from the bench and
his former time as a boxer while he was in school.
Over the same time, he and Lerlein had two more children,
Peggy Sue born in nineteen fifty and George Corley Wallace
the third known as George Junior, in nineteen fifty one,
and Lurline was increasingly frustrated by her husband's devotion to politics,

(05:11):
often to the neglect of his family. At this point
in his career, people were calling George Wallace quote a
dangerous liberal. He was part of charismatic Governor Big Jim
Fulsom's re election campaign in nineteen fifty three. Fulsom was
also Wallace's mentor, and in later years would be described
as being way ahead of his time in terms of

(05:33):
social progress and racial equality. Fulsom's positions during his career
included things like voting rights for black people, an end
to prison labor, better schools, funding for roads to make
it easier for farmers to get their crops to market,
and more government positions for women. Much of this, of course,
was an uphill battle and ultimately failed. A lot of

(05:56):
Wallace's policies in the earlier part of his career mostly
mirrored Fulsom's. During his two terms in the state legislature,
he drafted legislation to promote vocational schools and attract manufacturing
jobs to Alabama. In nineteen forty eight, when pro segregation
Dixiecrats walked out of the Democratic National Convention, both Wallace
and Fulsom stayed put. While in office in the State

(06:20):
House of Representatives, Wallace sponsored a bill that taxed alcohol
to fund trade schools. The Wallace Act, which was signed
in nineteen fifty one and was half of what became
known as the Wallace Cater Acts, allowed municipalities to sell
bonds in order to fund industrial development. This was part
of an effort to bring jobs to Alabama and diversify

(06:41):
the state's economy. Critics called the Wallace Cater Acts socialistic.
Another criticism was that most of the industries that moved
into Alabama through the act's incentive were low wage, non
union work that paid lower than the national average. In
nineteen fifty eight, Wallace embarked in his first campaign to
be the governor of Alabama. He continued on with the

(07:04):
kind of populist policies and relatively moderate positions on racial
equality that he had up until this point. Obviously that
is not his entire platform, but you know, he was
sort of continuing similar similarly to what his mentor had
and Big Jim Folsom had been elected on a similar
platform in both nineteen forty six and nineteen fifty four.

(07:25):
But Wallace's opponent in the Democratic primary was Attorney General
John Patterson. Patterson was running on a pro segregation platform
supported by the Ku Klux Klan. Wallace, on the other hand,
had the support of the National Association for the Advancement
of Colored People or NAACP. The primary went into a runoff,

(07:45):
with Patterson beating Wallace and then beating the Republican candidate,
William Longshore by a landslide. When asked what had gone wrong,
Wallace reportedly told supporters some version of the following quote,
which uses a slow that we are not going to
repeat quote. I got out enwarded by John Patterson. This

(08:06):
is the first and last time I will be out
inwarded by another candidate. This quote and variations on it
have been widely reported, but Wallace would later deny ever,
saying it Apart from shifting his politics on race completely,
this loss for governor took a toll on Wallace's personal life. Lerline,

(08:27):
fed up with his absences and rumors of infidelity and
a deep depression that he went into following the loss,
took the children to her parents' house and filed for divorce.
George begged her to come back, and the two eventually reconciled,
and their last child, Jamie Lee, named after Robert E. Lee,
was born. In nineteen sixty one, Wallace returned to his
position in the circuit court, where he turned his attention

(08:49):
to blocking federal efforts at civil rights. When the US
Civil Rights Commission requested that he turn over voting records,
he refused to do it and was threatened with prison
for contempt. He wound up turning the records over by
handing them over to grand Juries to turn in on
his behalf so he could say that he had not
personally given the government those records, but he could also

(09:12):
stay out of jail. In nineteen sixty two, Wallace ran
for governor again. This time he took a pro segregation
pro states rights platform, and like John Patterson, got the
support of the Ku Klux Klan. He won the Democratic
primary after a runoff, and the Republican Party fielded no
candidate at all in the election. Even though he was

(09:33):
running unopposed, he got more than three hundred thousand votes,
more than any candidate in Alabama history at that time.
That infamous Segregation Forever inaugural address was co written by
klansman Asa Carter, who could easily be his own podcast
subject as he also wrote The Education of Little Tree
in the rebel outlaw Josie Wales under the pseudonym of

(09:55):
Forrest Carter. Wallace's first term saw some of the most
note tentorious incidents of racist violence in the civil rights movement,
with critics blaming Wallace's rhetoric for stoking the fire and
we are going to talk about it after a quick
sponsor break. Although there were certainly incidents of racial violence

(10:21):
before George Wallace took office in Alabama, and that violence
was not confined just to Alabama, some of the most
infamous incidents in the United States civil rights movement happened
there during his first term. On May second, nineteen sixty three,
children began marching from Birmingham's Sixteenth Street Baptist Church to
City Hall as part of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's

(10:44):
Children's Crusade. That first day, hundreds were arrested. When even
more gathered to march on May third, Birmingham Commissioner of
Public Safety Bull Connor used high pressure fire hoses, police
dogs and clubs to turn them back. This was televised,
and although the march itself was controversial because it put

(11:04):
children in danger, it propelled the movement into the national spotlight.
The Sixteenth Street Baptist Church was bombed just before the
start of Sunday school on September fifteenth, nineteen sixty three,
killing Addie May Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Denise McNair, and Carol
Robertson ages eleven to fourteen. A week before the bombing,

(11:26):
George Wallace had told The New York Times that there
needed to be quote a few first class funerals, so
civil rights activists accused him of creating the climate that
led to the bombing. Doctor Martin Luther King Junior wired
him to say, quote, the blood of four little children
is on your hands. Your irresponsible and misguided actions have
created in Birmingham and Alabama, the atmosphere that has induced

(11:49):
continued violence and now murder. In nineteen sixty three, two
black students, Vivian Malone and James Hood, tried to enroll
in the University of allah Obama at Tuscaloosa, which was
still segregated, in spite of the fact that nine years
had passed since the Supreme Court found school segregation unconstitutional

(12:09):
in Brown versus Board of Education. It was also in
spite of the attempt of one other black student, Authorine Lucy,
who attended classes for three days in nineteen fifty six.
She was suspended quote for her own safety because white
students were rioting over her admission, including throwing tomatoes and
eggs at her. She sued the school, which then used

(12:33):
that lawsuit as grounds to expel her permanently. When Malone
and Hood tried to enroll, US District Judge Seaborn Lynn
forbade Wallace from interfering, but Wallace defied that order. Flanked
by state troopers, he personally blocked the door to Foster Auditorium,
where they were to register for class, until the National

(12:55):
Guard arrived later in the day to intervene. This became
now as the stand in the Schoolhouse door, and it
was one of the things that prompted President John F.
Kennedy to push for civil rights legislation. Selma, Alabama, was
also the scene of ongoing nonviolent civil rights protests during
this time, which were repeatedly met with arrests and violence

(13:17):
on the part of law enforcement. Many of these related
to voting rights. At the time, discriminatory literacy tests, poll
tax poll taxes, and a flat out refusal to register
black people to vote meant that many black people could not.
These protests included a series of marches to the Selma
Courthouse to try to register people to vote, and eventually

(13:38):
to the Selma to Montgomery March, which was a symbolic
march to the States Capitol following activist Jimmy Lee Jackson
being shot and killed by a state trooper during a march.
Jackson was one of several civil rights activists killed in
Alabama during Wallace's administration. Wallace had insisted that this march
would not take place, saying, quote such action will not

(13:59):
be allowed on the part of any other group of
citizens or non citizens of the State of Alabama, and
will not be allowed in this instance the government must
proceed in an orderly manner, and lawful and law abiding
citizens must transact to their business with the government. In
such a manner, there will be no march between Selma,
Alabama and Montgomery. And I have so instructed the Department

(14:20):
of Public Safety. On what came to be known as
Bloody Sunday, on March seventh, nineteen sixty five, several hundred
marchers to Selma tried to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
Under Wallace's orders to stop the march, State troopers and
a posse assembled by Dallas County share of Jim Clark
attacked the marchers and brutally beat them. Wallace would later say, quote,

(14:43):
it was something that happened that enraged me because I
didn't intend for it to happen that way. But I
didn't want them to get beyond that point where there
was some people that told me there might be some violence. So,
in other words, to prevent the marchers from getting to
somewhere where people were waiting to hurt them, the police

(15:04):
hurt them. The Selma to Montgomery march would be turned
away at the bridge a second time before US District
Judge Frank M. Johnson ordered that the marchers be allowed
to exercise their constitutional rights. Wallace said that Alabama did
not have the resources to protect them, and President Lyndon
Johnson federalized the Alabama National Guard and sent military police

(15:26):
and army troops to act as an escort. These Selma
to Montgomery marches raised national awareness of voting rights issues
and contributed directly to President Lyndon Johnson's push for the
Voting Rights Act of nineteen sixty five. This act banned
most of the strategies that had been used to keep
black people from voting. However, in twenty twelve, the Supreme

(15:47):
Court struck down one of its provisions, which had required
states that had previously used discriminatory election laws to get
federal approval before changing their election laws. As a result,
several states implemented election laws that the federal government had
previously denied as discriminatory. So we're going to back up

(16:10):
just a little bit, because in nineteen sixty four, Wallace
had actually made his first run at the White House,
getting his name on the ballot in three states, and
he didn't pursue the race aggressively, in part because Republican
candidate Barry Goldwater publicly denounced the Civil Rights Act of
nineteen sixty four, which was basically Wallace's whole platform. Propelled

(16:31):
by Goldwater's ultimate loss in the race, Wallace decided to
make a bigger effort in nineteen sixty eight, but there
was a problem. He'd have far more support in doing
so if he was still governor, but the Alabama constitution
did not allow governors to serve consecutive terms. First, he
tried to get the state legislature to amend the constitution

(16:51):
so that he could run again, but that failed, so
instead of admitting defeat, he put his wife ler Lean
on the ballot with the intent of basically running things
from behind the scenes. He would basically still have a
lot of the perks that came along with being governor
that he could use as a springboard to run for
president again with his wife actually being the one in office. However,

(17:14):
leer Ling had cancer during the Cesarean delivery of their daughter,
Janie Lee in nineteen sixty one. Doctors had found a
suspicious mass in her uterus, and as was common practice
at the time, the doctors told George but not learn Lean,
and they left it up to him whether she should
be informed, and George kept this information from her, saying

(17:37):
that he didn't want to upset her. So four years later,
in nineteen sixty five, when she went to a gynecologist
because she was having unusual bleeding, she was completely shocked
to find that she had a malignant tumor. In spite
of her complete lack of interest in politics, and in
spite of the fact that she had just undergone a

(17:59):
hysterectomy and radiation treatments which were described to the public
as female surgery, Laureline agreed to run as her husband's
stand in. She ran on a campaign of upholding all
of her husband's policies and his being her number one assistant.
In the early days on the campaign trail, she would
start off by giving a brief prepared remarks before introducing

(18:21):
her husband, who would then basically take it over from there.
As she gradually became more confident in her speaking skills,
she did start to campaign on her own, and in
the end she beat ten male candidates, some of them
former governors, in the primary. She then won the election
by a landslide, becoming the first woman governor elected in

(18:42):
the Deep South. When her term as governor began. She
and George had offices across the hall from each other,
and staff called them Governor Lerlein and Governor George. She
did push for some initiatives of her own, including legislation
related to state parks and to mental health. That latter
following a tour she made of two state institutions whose
conditions really horrified her. During her time in office, the

(19:04):
Alabama legislature also ratified an amendment that would allow governors
to serve consecutive terms, and as promised, she also upheld
her husband's promise to fight integration. In March of nineteen
sixty seven, a federal court ordered that Alabama's schools must
be desegregated in lee versus Macon County Board of Education.

(19:27):
This followed a lengthy series of maneuverings that George Wallace
had overseen during his first term as governor to try
to stop integration. This includes delaying the start of school,
stationing troops at schools to prevent black students from entering,
and transferring all of the white students out of Tuskegee
High School after black students were enrolled there. Following the

(19:49):
court order that came down during Luerline Wallace's time in office.
She delivered an address that stridently denounced this ruling as
infringing on the state's rights, vowing to US state troopers
to prevent integration if necessary. This case then went on
to the Supreme Court and Wallace versus the United States,
and the Supreme Court upheld the lower court's ruling, at

(20:11):
which point some progress was actually made in desegregating the schools. Lurline.
Wallace was not able, however, to keep up her duties
as governor for long. In July of nineteen sixty seven,
doctors found another tumor in her abdomen, followed by numerous
other tumors the following January. She underwent tests and treatment

(20:32):
at the MD Anderson Clinic in Houston, Texas. Because there
wasn't a cancer center in Alabama because she was governor,
she had to travel back to Alabama during her treatment
at least once every twenty days. During a lot of
this time, she was in severe pain and she underwent
multiple operations. This went on until May of nineteen sixty eight,
when she returned home to her family to die, and

(20:55):
she died on May seventh, nineteen sixty eight, at the
age of forty one, after just six teen months in office.
Her body lay in state in an open casket, something
that her husband ordered in defiance of her wishes, at
the Capitol Rotunda. This is the first time anyone had
laid in state there since the eighteen eighty nine death
of Jefferson Davis, who had been president of the Confederate

(21:16):
States of America. Her death was met with a huge
outpouring of public grief, with public schools, state offices, and
some businesses closing the day of the funeral, and more
than twenty five thousand people going to the capital to
pay their respects. And we're going to next get into
Wallace's later career, but first we're going to pause for

(21:36):
a moment and have a word from one of our sponsors.
After ler Leine Wallace's death in nineteen sixty eight, she
was succeeded by the Lieutenant Governor, Albert Brewer, who raised

(21:57):
funds for a cancer center at the University of Alabama
in her memory. And that same year, as he had
been planning to do, George Wallace ran for president again
under the American Independent Party. Wallace got onto the ballot
in every state, and he won five of them. Earning
more than ten percent of the popular vote, although he
dropped some of his most explicit racist language, his campaign

(22:20):
decried the influence of things like liberals, communists, and the
interference of the federal government, leaning on more coded language
to reach out to white voters who were unhappy with
the progress of integration and increasing civil rights for black people.
He ran for governor again in nineteen seventy, using much
of the same anti integration platform that had won him

(22:42):
the election in nineteen sixty two, and at times the
nineteen seventy campaign was even more explicit, but once he
was actually in office, he softened his rhetoric. Following the
passage of the Voting Rights Act and the long work
of the Civil rights movement, many of Alabama's black population,
who made up more than a quarter of the state's population,
were now registered to vote. Whilas realized that he would

(23:05):
undermine his efforts if he continued to explicitly attack such
a large group of the state's voters. In nineteen seventy two,
Whillas once again ran for president, this time as a
Democrat and once again primarily reaching out to disaffected white voters,
decrying forced bussing to integrate schools and welfare loafing and

(23:26):
advocating quote a return to law and order in an
end to foreign aid programs, especially to communist countries. After
winning the state of Florida, his campaign looked like it
was set to be a lot more successful than he
had been in nineteen sixty eight. But then, while he
was campaigning in Laurel, Maryland, he was shot by Arthur
Bremer while working the crowd at a rally. Bremer had

(23:49):
previously planned to assassinate Richard Nixon, but had ultimately never
opened fire. While still recuperating, Wallace won the primaries in
Maryland in Michigan as well well. However, this injury left
Wallace paralyzed from the waist down, and since he was
hospitalized for months, he was unable to continue his campaign.

(24:10):
He would go on to maintain that he would have
won that presidency had he not been shot. Although his
injury put him out of the presidential race, he ran
for Alabama governor again in nineteen seventy four, since that
amendment to the state constitution that had come through during
Lerlin Wallace's administration once again allowed him to do so.
He won for his third term and his second consecutive term,

(24:33):
and he once again spent part of his term as governor.
Again running for president in nineteen seventy six. He won
the states of Alabama, South Carolina, and Mississippi in the primary,
ultimately losing the Democratic nomination to Jimmy Carter, who he
endorsed after dropping out of the race, and numerous biographers
describe him as being a lot more interested in campaigning

(24:56):
than in governing. It sure sounds that way. He spends
a lot of of his time as governor on the
presidential campaign trail. It's true story. So after his gunshot injury,
and in light of the changing racial politics of the
United States in his later life, George Wallace started reaching
out to the black community and trying to make amends.
Historians and biographers really disagree on whether this attempt was

(25:16):
motivated by a genuine change in views or whether it
was political savvy and a desire not to be remembered
on the wrong side of history. He began to insist
that his hard line segregationist stance was based on the
Constitution and a misreading of the Bible, not on white supremacy.
This does not, however, quite sync with some of the

(25:38):
quotes that are attributed to him, such as quote the
colored are fine in their place, but they're just like children,
and it's not something that's going to change. It's written
in stone. He also met with several of the still
living civil rights leaders who he had actively worked against,
including the Reverend Ralph D. Abernathy, the Reverend Jesse Jackson,

(25:59):
and Representative Lewis. Lewis had been seriously beaten on Bloody
Sunday during the first Selma to Montgomery March. While presenting
her with the Lurelin B. Wallace Award for Courage, he
also praised Vivian Vivian Malone for her quote, strength, grace,
and above all courage during the stand in the schoolhouse door.

(26:20):
In the words of Selma attorney J. L. Chesnutt, quoted
in the PBS American Experience production George Wallace Set in
the Woods on Fire, which came out in two thousand, quote,
I have no problem for giving George Wallace. I will
not forget George Wallace because we must deal with the
reality of Wallace. How is it that a demagogue insulting
twenty million black people daily on the television can rise

(26:43):
to the heights that Wallace did forgive, yes, forget never.
George Wallace was elected to his last term as governor
in nineteen eighty two in a campaign that actively sought
and received votes from the black community. His win made
him the only person in Alabama history to serve for four terms,
and we took office in nineteen eighty three. He made

(27:05):
it a point to appoint black officials to government positions.
He also became a born again Christian that year. He
retired from that last term in January of nineteen eighty seven,
and he died on September thirteenth of nineteen ninety eight
in Montgomery, Alabama. Regardless of whether Wallace's shifts in racial
ideology were genuine or just politically expedient, his methods of

(27:28):
campaigning and his shifting platforms have really had a long
list lasting influence on American politics. Dan T. Carter, in
a paper published in the Journal of Southern History in
nineteen ninety six, writes Wallace more than any other political
figure of the nineteen sixties and early nineteen seventies, since
the frustrations, the rage of many American voters made commonplace

(27:51):
a new level of political incibility and intemperate rhetoric and
focused that anger upon a convenient set of scapegoats. I
was in nineteen ninety six, so that is George Wallace.
Someone asked us on Yeah, somebody asked us on Twitter
one time if we would do a podcast on Bull Connor,

(28:12):
who was the person who turned the fire hoses on
the Children's Crusade during their march. Uh. I'm just gonna say,
after having done this one, I'm not that's gonna be
way down the leaklist because it's hard. Yeah. Thanks so

(28:32):
much for joining us on this Saturday. If you'd like
to send us a note, our email addresses History Podcast
at iHeartRadio dot com, and you can subscribe to the
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listen to your favorite shows.