American politician who was the Democratic Governor of Alabama, beginning in 1963, for three terms. As a segregationalist, he ran for president in 1968, 1972 and 1976 unsuccessfully. In spite of building his career on segregation, he insisted that, in his heart, he was not a racist. A long-time champion of state’s rights, he dominated his own state for almost a generation. He avowed that his theme of middle-class empowerment was borrowed by Richard Nixon in 1968 and then by Ronald Reagan.
After being elected to his first term as governor in 1962, Wallace became the foil for the huge protests that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. used to destroy segregation in public accommodations in 1963 and to secure voting rights for blacks in 1965.
Wallace was the product of a Southern cotton town where mule-drawn wagons were as common as cars, and blacks were kept “in their place.” His dad was the wastrel son of a beloved local doctor, and his mom had survived abandonment as a child and had been raised in an orphanage. Like his dad, young George was quick with his fists, a Golden Gloves winner while still in high school. Drawn to politics, he had his moment of truth at 15, as a legislative page in the Capitol at Montgomery, when he set his sights on the political process.
At the University of Alabama, he began to shape his own political future. With frenetic energy and tireless pugnacity, he worked his way through school in menial jobs, cramming for tests with borrowed books.
In 1943, he married 16-year-old Lureen Burns; their daughter Bobbi Joe was born the following year. Entering the Army for WW II service, Wallace was a flight engineer on bombing missions over Japan. By the time the war ended, he had been through nine combat missions and was discharged with ten percent disability from combat fatigue.
Post-war, Wallace began a rapid climb up the political ladder. He was named assistant to Alabama’s attorney general in 1946 and the following year won election to the Alabama legislature. By 1948 he was identified with the progressive, racially moderate wing of a state Democratic Party that still had “White Supremacy” emblazoned on its ballot emblem.
From 1953-58, Wallace was an elected district judge in his home county while laying plans to run for governor in 1958. During that time, he committed two betrayals, one personal and one political, that blemished his reputation for life while giving him, at the same time, a long strangle hold on Alabama politics. The first was in 1958 when he was recorded as saying that no one “will ever out-nigger me again,” and the second was when he denounced a federal judge and former friend as a “carpet-bagging, scalawagging liar.” His ensuing nickname, “The Fighting Judge,” helped carry him into the governorship in 1962 as an all-out segregationist.
In his four terms as governor, Alabama saw an era of unparalleled corruption. Wallace’s brother Gerald and his associates sold state office supplies, printing, vending machines and building leases as well as founding an asphalt company that garnered more than a million dollars in state contracts.
Wallace promised white voters to continue the historic oppression of its disfranchised and largely impoverished black citizens. In his inaugural address on 1/14/1963 he promised to protect segregation “now, tomorrow, forever.” On 6/11/1963, he vowed to stand in the doorway if necessary to prevent the school attendance of two black students until President Kennedy threatened him with jail if he defied the court order. It was a dangerous time for blacks. During the Wallace years, at least ten people died in racially motivated killings.
In 1966, Wallace ran his wife, Lureen, for governor, a post which she won and held for two years until she died of cancer in 1968. In 1971, he married Cornelia Snively, a niece of Governor “Big Jim” Folsom; they divorced in 1978. In 1981, he married singer Lisa Taylor. They separated in 1986 and eventually divorced.
By the time of the 1972 presidential election, Wallace was running strongly in the primaries when he was abruptly halted. On 5/15/1972, while campaigning, he was shot and paralyzed by 21-year old Arthur Bremer at a Laurel, MS shopping center. From that time on, his health was never strong and he believed, for the rest of his life, that were it not for the untimely bullet, he would have been on the presidential ticket. He ran once more, in 1976, but to a weakened response.
On 9/13/1998, Wallace died in a Montgomery hospital.
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