The George Wallace We Forgot

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/24/opinion/24rymer.html?_r=1&ref=opinion&oref=slogin


The George Wallace We Forgot
By RUSS RYMER
Published: October 24, 2008

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So to call Mr. Lewis simply a Freedom Rider is to give incomplete acknowledgment to his political struggles.

Likewise, to describe George Wallace as a simple racist is to give his biography short shrift. As a circuit court judge in the 1950s, Wallace was respectful toward blacks, and as a legislator from 1947 to 1953, he was a moderate. In 1948, when Strom Thurmond led the Southern delegations out of the Democratic convention to protest the party’s pioneer civil rights plank, Wallace stayed in his seat. Though no fan of the plank, he was yet more Democrat than demagogue, and was instrumental in rallying the other Southern alternate delegates to save the convention’s quorum, and pass its platform.

He might have carried a tolerant message into the Alabama governor’s mansion in 1958, but he lost the race after spurning the support of the Ku Klux Klan (which then backed his primary opponent, John Patterson) and being endorsed by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Sadly for Wallace’s state, his region, his nation and himself, he did not respond as John Lewis did after his defeat by Carmichael. Mr. Lewis, whenever confronted with calls to divisiveness, chose to redouble his commitment to reason and tolerance. After his loss to Mr. Patterson, Wallace is said to have turned to an aide and declared, “I was out-niggered ... and I’ll never be out-niggered again.”

After Wallace finally won the governorship in 1962, his administration was never as race-hostile as his campaign appeals implied; black leaders found his office door open, and often his mind, too. But he would eternally pay the price for the methods he used to gain that office.

I once saw that price on vivid display, at a Wallace for president rally in downtown Boston. In 1975, that city was contorted by its own race war over school busing, and the enormous two-tier assembly hall was packed. It was an angry crowd — a black television cameraman was punched as he walked up the aisle. In the middle of Wallace’s remarks, there was a loud explosion, and Wallace, who had been paralyzed by a bullet three years earlier, fell forward from his wheelchair into safety behind the podium.

The noise was caused by a crashing klieg light, knocked over in a fracas as a heckler in the balcony was attacked by the crowd. As Wallace clambered back into his chair, his supporters beat the protester bloody and tried to dump him over the balcony rail. “Just an undecided voter, folks. Just an undecided voter,” Wallace pleaded into his microphone, but there was no quelling the fire. “Kill him! Kill him! Kill him!” people in the hall thundered, until the man was rescued — barely — by Secret Service agents.

In the final debate of this presidential campaign, faced with John McCain’s demand that he repudiate Mr. Lewis’s analogy, Barack Obama said he didn’t think his opponent was another George Wallace, and that sounds reasonable if you assume Mr. Lewis was referring to Wallace the vile racist, not the more tragic Wallace, the one-time straight campaigner who bartered conviction for expedience when he thought a raw appeal to division could gain him crucial votes.

It would behoove everyone in the current race for America’s highest offices to pay attention to what Mr. Lewis was really saying, and judge it for its provenance in his long experience. Better than perhaps any living American, he knows that courage on the front line is one thing, and on the campaign stage quite another, knows how tiny and harmless the seeds of fanaticism can seem, how one cry of “kill him” can crescendo into a chorus that can’t be stifled. Mr. Lewis might be deemed generous in wishing on no other member of his profession the harrowed look I witnessed in George Wallace’s eyes as he struggled up off the floor in Boston and beheld what a hell he’d wrought.

His segregationism seems to have been more of a political ploy, like McCain's Bush-hugging and conserative red-meat rhetoric. As the article points out, the rest of his life was a little more mixed:

Wallace became a born-again Christian in the late 1970s and apologized for his earlier segregationist views to black civil rights leaders. He said while he once sought power and glory, he realized he needed to seek love and forgiveness. His term as Governor (1983–1987) saw a record number of black appointments to government positions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Wallace

Wallace embodied the odd disconnects in racial attitudes that are sometimes invisible to people outside the South, and the struggle of whites to come to terms with a multiracial society in Dixie. I found him fascinating and difficult to hate. He was shot just a few miles from where I live in Maryland.

It is horrible when someone is tempted to sacrifice basic principles of decency for the sake of popularity and power (if I was a religious person, I might think of this as 'selling one's soul'). Wallace had a terrible influence on his state, which might have been avoided; and if one has *any* conscience, it must ultimately be hard to live with oneself after such actions.

Lewis sounds like a very good man, by contrast.

many long years ago. My partner knew him personally and has related much of the same -- Wallace wasn't the virulent racist I had grown up believing he was. He was a lot more complex than the media had given us to believe. Obviously, neither was he homophobic, accepting the acquaintance of a neighbor who was out-gay in Alabama, thirty years ago when it was dangerous for anybody to be out, let alone in Alabama. Knowing that the man was kind to someone who much later after the fact became an inseperable part of my life, who to this day speaks kindly of him, has made me temper a lot of my opinions -- or more correctly, what I thought I knew about the man.

Maybe not. But he was ready, willing, & able to play one on TV.

then what causes one to reflect when one has nothing to do but look back are different indeed. Believe me, my first reaction was a lot like yours. But I've had the opportunity to have private conversations with someone who had the opportunity to meet, speak with, and get to know the man.

You or I haven't. You'll just have to open your mind. Or leave it as closed as your comment implies you might. That's up to you. I've had some conversations with a man who's had private conversations with the man himself. That leads to an entirely different viewpoint -- indeed, one which I thought I, myself, might not have been willing to entertain.

All I'm saying is that I'm willing to agree with the OP that there was indeed a great deal more to the man than we were taught to believe. I'm willing to take that from someone with first-hand knowledge, rather than flickering black-and-white television images. I think you and I both know what the media can portray and what reality might be can, and often are, two entirely different things.

...what a person is or does in private & what a person is or does in public can indeed be two very different things. Only one, not both, of those two different things matters in public, in history, & to, let's say, frightened little girls seeking an education.

Too bad Governor Wallace lacked the courage & integrity to bring his alleged private & documented public personae into better alignment with one another. I suggest you try rehabilitating the historical record of someone else.

I also suggest you lay off the "closed-mind" comments. You might then not seem quite so much like someone whose position is weak enough to require the support of an ad hominem attack.

and you missed the nature of my post. I didn't defend the man. I stated by way of personal information that there was more to the man than we had been given by the media. I agreed with the OP in that he was a complex individual. That's it.

You, OTOH, wanted to make this about me, rather than about anything in the thread. So far, you have brought neither fact nor anecdote to the discussion, yet accused me of ad hominem. Again, I only agreed with the OP in that there was more to the man than the public persona. If you want to get into a flame-war, you'll have to do it by yourself.