TUSCALOOSA | George Wallace Jr. knows his father's legacy is firmly set in the minds of many, perhaps even in the pages of history. But in a talk given Thursday evening, Wallace said his father, a four-time Alabama governor and four-time presidential candidate, lived two lives.
TUSCALOOSA | George Wallace Jr. knows his father’s legacy is firmly set in the minds of many, perhaps even in the pages of history.
But in a talk given Thursday evening, Wallace said his father, a four-time Alabama governor and four-time presidential candidate, lived two lives: One as a brash politician and supporter of segregation, and the other as a man seeking forgiveness after a would-be assassin’s bullet that left him paralyzed during a presidential campaign in 1972.
Of that moment, as the elder Wallace lay on his back, his blood pooling on the ground, his son said “this was his first step on the road to Damascus.”
According to the Bible, it was on the road to Damascus that Saul, a persecutor of early Christians, was struck down and blinded by God before converting to Christianity, changing his name to Paul and becoming an apostle of Jesus.
Wallace spoke at the Tuscaloosa Public Library and read excerpts from his book, “Governor George Wallace: The Man You Never Knew by the Man Who Knew Him Best.” The event was organized by the Tuscaloosa Genealogical Society.
“I never intended to write a book. I started writing about three years ago early in the morning about my father, perceptions and about events. The more I wrote, the more I realized that my father was a man many people never knew,” Wallace said.
“I thought it only fair that his entire journey be chronicled. All of our lives are entire journeys, not just one or two stops along the way.”
Wallace insisted that his father, who in 1963 stood in the doorway of Foster Auditorium on the University of Alabama campus to block entry of black students James Hood and Vivian Malone Jones, “never had hate toward anyone.”
“My father was raised in a culture and of a generation, born nearly 100 years ago, where people accepted segregation as they accepted other norms in their lives. And they didn’t accept it with malice or hate in their hearts,” Wallace said.
He said his father, born in 1919, knew well the suffering endured by Alabama’s poor, rural families, including black families.
“We did not have the manufacturing in the South to mitigate some of the effects of the Great Depression as they did in the Northeast. My father would see his grandfather boil morphine for people. My father saw suffering, physical and economic suffering, at a very young age,” Wallace said.
“And it had an impact on his life. He had a great affection for all the people of the South.”
However, when the elder Wallace ran for governor in Alabama in 1962, he was a vocal supporter of segregation and campaigned on the issue.
“He used the issue, there’s no question about it,” Wallace said.
And while the elder Wallace did support segregation at that time, his son said Thursday that he never advocated the use of violence to preserve it.
“When he stood in the schoolhouse door, which he regretted, he told me that, he said ‘I was young and brash.’ But there was no violence. ... He went to great lengths to keep peace at the University of Alabama.”
Wallace said his father is also wrongly blamed for the events of March 7, 1965. Known as Bloody Sunday, between 500 and 600 civil rights marchers were brutally attacked by state troopers after they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma.
“My father’s command was disobeyed. He said if they cross the bridge, let them cross and line the streets to protect them,” Wallace said. He said one of the men in the elder Wallace’s office that day said “I have never seen a man as enraged as George Wallace when he got the news of what happened on the bridge in Selma.”
Wallace told the story of how one night his father came in his room and asked him to play a song for him on the guitar. The younger Wallace, 14 at the time, had just learned Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’.”
The third verse of the song takes aim at Wallace’s “Stand in the Schoolhouse Door.”
“Come senators, congressmen, please heed the call. Don’t stand in the doorway, don’t block up the hall,” Wallace sang to his father.
“I remember him turning to me with a startled look in his eyes. ... He was now hearing a song about social conscience and social change ... and in it he was the very embodiment of the opposition,” Wallace said.
“He got a faraway look in his eyes ... I thought I saw the look of regret in his eye and ... I knew he had seen me realize that.”
Wallace said his father eventually felt that he had turned his back on the people who were suffering the most, the black folks in Alabama.
“He said, ‘My conscience tells me I was wrong about (segregation), but I was right about the federal government trying to control every aspect of our lives from the cradle to the grave,’ ” Wallace said.
“It’s important to remember though, that this wasn’t just a journey my father took. The South took it, and the state of Alabama took it.”
Even before the assassination attempt, Wallace said that his father thought that he might be shot one day.
“He realized how volatile he was. But he thought if he were shot, it would be in the head and he would die from that. He never envisioned being shot and being paralyzed from the waist down and the chronic pain for the rest of his life,” Wallace said.
“But as time passed, he came to have an understanding of the suffering of others in a way that I’ll never know.”
Eventually, Wallace said his father considered his life’s greatest victory to be not his four terms as governor or the millions of presidential votes he secured around the country, but his faith and relationship with God.
After the assassination attempt, Wallace wrote to the gunman, Arthur Bremer.
“He told him that he loved him and he had forgiven him. And he told Arthur Bremer if you’ll ask our lord and savior Jesus Christ into your heart, we’ll be together in heaven,” Wallace said.
“He told me once, ‘If I can’t forgive him, the Lord won’t forgive me.’ ”