George Wallace Reconsidered: Why Alabama’s most polarizing governor deserves a second look
Huey Long. George Wallace. Southern politics creates complicated men. Understanding them—faults and all—beats burning their memory at the stake and pretending the flames light the road of progress.
An excellent read from John Slaughter over at the Old South Repository.
In 1992, I bought an old barn-kept pickup from a widow woman. It still had a Wallace for President sticker on the bumper. I valued the sticker more than the whole truck and to tell the truth, the sticker was probably worth more. It was a sad day when I realized that the sun had finally faded it beyond recognition. - DD
“Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”
Those six words, burned into every high-school textbook, reduce George C. Wallace to a cartoon villain. They hide the inconvenient reality that the same man paved Alabama’s roads, built her community colleges, raised teacher salaries, and, in the twilight of his career, asked forgiveness from the people he once opposed. To dismiss Wallace outright is to miss the full story of twentieth-century Southern populism—a story that would be the backbone of GOP politics from Nixon to Regan to Trump.
Barbour County, Alabama, was no Camelot. Half Black, half White, and wholly broke, it was a place where a doctor was paid in chickens or peanuts if he got paid at all. George Wallace’s grandfather was that doctor, and young George tagged along on house calls down clay roads lined the shacks of sharecroppers.
This experience would shape the adolescent mind of George Wallace. He learned that poverty is stubbornly color-blind, and working families need a champion who spoke their language…plainly, proudly, and loudly.
Long before Wallace learned the machinery of Southern politics, those lesson learned on house calls hardened into an ethic. For Wallace government existed to yank ordinary people out of the mud, not to lecture them from ivory towers. Everything else Wallace did—Golden Gloves trophies, naval service, the University of Alabama law degree—was just sharpening the spear he intended to throw on behalf of the people of Alabama.
Contrary to the modern portrayals…
Good one and trust me I was taught Louisiana history and the things Huey did for Louisiana like building bridges so low ships had to stop in New Orleans among other things and my teacher happened to in the Long family so we got a little inside family history not in textbooks
In the distant past, pre-forced integration, murders like that which took the life of 17 year old Texas teen Austin Metcalf didn’t happen at schools.