George Wallace, Four Races, and the Long Arc

In January of nineteen sixty-three, George Corley Wallace stood in front of the Alabama State Capitol in Montgomery and delivered an inaugural address that ended with a phrase that would define his career and haunt him for the rest of his life: Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever. He had not written those words himself, they were inserted at the last moment by a speechwriter named Asa Carter, a man with deep ties to the Klan, but Wallace delivered them without hesitation, and he turned them into a political identity he would use to win the governorship four times and run for president four times. Wallace had not always been a race-baiter in the explicit mode.

He lost his first gubernatorial primary in nineteen fifty-eight to a candidate with more overt Klan backing and reportedly told an aide he would never be out-segged again. He kept that promise for a decade. He stood in the schoolhouse door at the University of Alabama in June of nineteen sixty-three, in a theatrical confrontation with Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, blocking the federally court-ordered enrollment of two Black students.

Vivian Malone and James Hood enrolled anyway. Wallace stepped aside after a brief standoff that he had planned entirely for the cameras. He ran for president in nineteen sixty-four, nineteen sixty-eight, nineteen seventy-two, and nineteen seventy-six.

In the nineteen sixty-eight race, running as a third-party candidate on the American Independent ticket, he won five Southern states and forty-six electoral votes, and he demonstrated to Republicans the political potential of white Southern resentment. Richard Nixon's Southern Strategy was, in part, a response to Wallace's showing, an attempt to bring those voters into the Republican Party without the explicit racism Wallace had offered. In May of nineteen seventy-two, while campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination in Laurel, Maryland, Wallace was shot by a gunman named Arthur Bremer.

He survived but was paralyzed from the waist down. He would spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair. His final chapter is part of the record and worth noting.

In his last gubernatorial race in nineteen eighty-two, Wallace apologized publicly to the Black community, campaigned aggressively for Black votes, received a significant share of them, and won. In his later years he visited churches in the Black Belt to ask for forgiveness. Whether those apologies were sincere, or whether they were one more political calculation, is a question his contemporaries disagreed on and historians still debate.