George Wallace

George Wallace (1919-1998) was a lawyer, state legislator and circuit judge who lost the 1958 Alabama governor's race and then adopted hard-line segregationist appeals. Elected governor in 1962, he served four terms, and his wife Lurleen held the office in 1967-1968 while he acted as de facto governor. He ran for president four times, winning five Southern states as a third-party candidate in 1968. In May 1972 he was shot while campaigning in Maryland and left paralyzed. In the late 1970s he declared himself a born-again Christian, apologized for his segregationist past and won a final term in 1982 with substantial Black support.

Wallace's 1968 and 1972 campaigns showed that appeals to working-class white voters on race, crime and federal power could cross regional lines, and historians credit his rhetoric with influencing both national parties. Some Alabamians remember the expansion of junior colleges and trade schools, and his final term, in which he appointed a record number of Black officials and won about 90 percent of the Black vote in the 1982 general election. Critics argue that his defense of segregation delayed change and encouraged violence, citing the troopers' attack on marchers at Selma in 1965, and that his economic record left Alabama with a low-wage economy and a tax code favoring large landholders and corporations. In 1979 he said of the schoolhouse door stand that he had been wrong.