Fifty years ago today, George Wallace was sworn in as governor of Alabama. He got elected on a strictly segregationist platform, after losing to John Patterson in 1958 and swearing in unmistakeable language that no one would ever outflank him on segregation ever again. And right on cue, he famously proclaimed “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!”
I was born only nine years later. Wallace was governor of Alabama for ten of the first fourteen years of my life. People will whine and wail that talking about segregation and civil rights in Alabama is dragging up old business, and those people are assholes and wrong. This is not Rube Burrows robbing the mail train in the late 1800s, this is living memory. My parents were alive and married for this, and one of them is still living and remarried to someone who was alive and grown at the time. And the children of these people, who were presumably born and raised in that same era, are in their forties and fifties, and may or may not be raising their own children with the same belief system.
The tragedy of Alabama is that the archetypal Alabamians are Forrest Gump, Atticus Finch, and George Wallace, and two of them are fictional characters. The third won five states in a run for President in 1968 and was on the verge of doing it again in 1972 before he was shot. He provided a wedge that prized off enough southern Democrats to make the GOP competitive in the South at a national level by the 1980s – and dominant by the 1990s. And most of all, his particular flavor of resentment-driven racial populism provided the template for the modern Republican party. Everyone from Lee Atwater to Newt Gingrich to Sarah Palin to the Tea Party identity-laundering movement – it’s all of a single piece going back fifty years, and the headwaters of that movement are in George Clio Wallace.
Because he didn’t much believe it. Black defendants and attorneys who practiced in Alabama said they never got a fairer shake from the bench than from circuit judge George Wallace, and in 1958, he had plenty of black endorsers (such as they were, given the paucity of black voters in Alabama). Which is the worst part of it all: even if he wasn’t a true believer, he was willing to use it to stir the shit. He willingly leveraged the worst in humanity for his own political gain, and in doing so validated the beliefs of the most retrograde and primitive thinkers in American politics.
He’s dead now, after a dotage spent in tearful apology and relentless backpedaling. This is the problem with a merciful and loving God: one hates to think that a man who drove his cancer-afflicted wife into an early grave and breathed life into fifty years of neo-Confederacy now reposes in the heavenly arms. But then, maybe that’s how that grace thing works. Or maybe he’s not, and we all have it coming one way or the other.
But he had his day. He had sixteen years as governor, plus a few more over the shoulder of poor Lurleen, and he was never adequately defeated or repudiated, and his venom still poisons the soil and soul of his native state half a century on.
He was Alabama’s Hitler, and we let him live. Shame on all of us.