George Wallace: Governor of Alabama in 1960's and His Role with the Civil Rights Movement - Coursework Example

Writer's Name] [Instructor's Name] [Subject] [Date] George Wallace: Governor Of Alabama In 1960's And His Role With The Civil Rights Movement Introduction – George Wallace George C. Wallace, who died at 79, was the four-time governor of Alabama and four-time applicant for president of the United States who became recognized as the personification of confrontation to the civil rights movement of the 1960s, died in September 1998 in Montgomery, Ala. He had encountered Parkinson's sickness in his last years. His childhood, his years in college, law school, and the army integrated that personality with his sense of political identity, an identity built upon the twin pillars of resentment and an almost pathetic search for affection and respect. While he was popular at the University of Alabama, he was always conscious of his "country" background and his lack of polish and sophistication. He might have been one of the brightest members of his class but he was never admitted into the "right" circles where the sons of Alabama planters and businessmen formed the social associations that would shape the rest of their lives. Pleasant and sociable to all, he privately resented what he saw as condescension and patronization by the "swells" of Montgomery and Birmingham society. What Wallace wanted more than anything else were a visible sign of affection and respect. His identity as a beleaguered white Southerner and his sensitivity to being looked down upon strengthened his appeal to ethnic minorities and working class Americans. Many of his followers were, in the parlance of the social scientists, alienated. Much like the Populists of the late nineteenth century, Wallace supporters -- North and South -- felt psychologically and culturally isolated from the dominant currents of American life in the 1960s. Ironically, it was the peculiar complexity of those provincial Alabama politics that strengthened as well as limited Wallace's national role. We tend to forget that Wallace began his career as a supporter of one of the most liberal Southern politicians in modern history, James Folsom. As a delegate to the 1948 national Democratic Convention, Wallace stayed with the party loyalists and refused to join the racist Dixiecrat walkout for Strom Thurmond. In the state legislature, he consistently introduced legislation to aid disadvantaged members of Alabama society. George Wallace: Role With The Civil Rights Movement Alabama, whatever its racist crudities, was not Mississippi. For more than one hundred years, yeoman farmers from northern Alabama had waged a political guerrilla war against the reactionary black belt gentry and the state had, by Southern standards, a substantial organized labor movement in the state and a vigorous tradition of working class political activism. Few other Southern states had furnished liberal politicians to match Hugo Black, "Big Jim" Folsom, Lister Hill, and John Sparkman. George Wallace was no Strom Thurmond and his past support of New Deal liberalism (or "progressivism," as he preferred to call it) gave him an ear for the complex variant of populist conservatism that characterized blue-collar workers and disenchanted Democrats all over the nation. The literature of George C. Wallace's four presidential campaigns and his influence on the national political scene is considerable and largely critical and negative in tone. Mostly ignored, however, has been his performance as governor of Alabama, and in particular, his record in the area of education. Elected four times to serve four-year terms in 1962, 1970, 1974, and again in 1982. 1960s, however, he sensed that millions of Americans were gripped by a sense of betrayal. Wallace was not an analytical thinker, but he instinctively grasped the depth and breadth of that sense of betrayal. He knew that a substantial percentage of the American electorate reviled the civil rights protesters and anti-war demonstrators as indications of a fundamental turn down in the traditional cultural compass of God, family, and country; a turn down mirrored in the rising crime rates, legalization of abortion, the rise in out-of-wedlock pregnancies, the increase in divorce rates, the Supreme Court's verdict against school prayer, and the proliferation of "obscene" literature and films. And moving always beneath the surface was the fear that blacks were moving beyond their safely encapsulated ghettos into "our" streets, "our" schools, "our" neighborhoods. At the core of his support was the same racist energy that had powered the Wallace domination of Alabama politics. Wallace, after all, had won the Alabama governorship in 1962 with his promise to maintain white supremacy; a promise he reaffirmed in his oft-quoted inaugural speech in early 1963. "We sound the drum for freedom," he told an all-white audience as he stood on the spot where Jefferson Davis had taken the oath as President of the Confederate States of America. "It is very appropriate that from this cradle of the Confederacy, this very heart of the great Anglo-Saxon Southland, that today we sound the drum for freedom as have our generations of forebears before us time and again down through history. Let us rise to the call for freedom-loving blood that is in us and send our answer to the tyranny that clanks its chains upon the South. In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever! ." (1963, George Wallace, first term as governor) The expressions he spoke at his 1963 opening, as governor of Alabama, became a uniting cry for those disparate to integration and abhorrence to the rising Civil Rights Movement. However, he is also the man who, as a moderator in the 1950s, frequently ruled in errand of black plaintiffs and commanded that lawyers take care of them with esteem. “Law and order will always break down when you try to mix races here in our part of the country. I have nothing against people of opposite color. I got colored people - I have lived around them all of my life my children right now are being nursed by colored folks. I just don't believe in social and educational mixing”. (24th April, 1963, George Wallace talking to Robert Kennedy about segregation in Alabama) Within a year of becoming governor, Wallace made national headings by positioning alongside the federal government on the subject of integration. He rested at the doors of a building at the University of Alabama, intimidating to obstruct the entry of two black students to the school. Opposing him was then Assistant Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, sent by President John F. Kennedy to put into effect a federal court's verdict to integrate the university. "A racist is one who despises someone because of his color, and an Alabama segregationist is one who conscientiously believes that it is in the best interest of Negro and white to have a separate education and social order." (1964, George Wallace, from U.S. News & World Report) But Wallace's public speaking fueled racist flames, with aggressive and deadly penalties. Three months after his University of Alabama bearing, a bomb planted by Klansmen at Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church slaughtered four children. Civil rights chief Martin Luther King affirmed, "The murders of yesterday stand as blood on the hands of Governor Wallace." In September 1963, Wallace structured state police to Huntsville, Mobile, Tuskegee and Birmingham to put off public schools from opening, subsequent a federal court order to put together Alabama schools. Helmeted and greatly armed state police and state National Guard units kept students and faculty from ingoing schools. Following civil turbulence ensuing in at least one death, President Kennedy once more nationalized the Guard and observes the schools integrated. In 1965, six hundred principally black civil rights protesters set out from Selma to the state capital in Montgomery, fifty miles far off, to make voter registration a national concern. Wallace ordered an order to end the march. When the marchers arrived at the Edmund Pettus Bridge at the border of Montgomery, they initiated state police waiting with sticks, bullwhips, and tear gas. Shocked national viewers saw the beatings that pursued on television. Within days, President Johnson asked Congress to overtake the most complete voting rights statement in the nation's history. "There’s no reason to let any one group call all the shots in this state. And you know the militant black bloc vote in this state, if they take over, it’s going to control politics for the next 50 years in Alabama, and I know you are not going to let that happen." (1970, George Wallace) In 1982, he stood for governor a fourth time. In a break point instant, he confessed that he had been erroneous about "race" the whole time. He was designated by an alliance symbolized by blacks, prearranged labor and forces looking for to advance public education. In that race, he passed all 10 of the state's counties with a preponderance black population, nine of them by an improved than two-to-one edge. He gave up work four years later, a progressively more distant and physically beleaguered man. "We thought [segregation] was in the best interests of all concerned. We were mistaken," he told a black group in 1982. "The Old South is gone," but "the New South is still opposed to government regulation of our lives." (George Wallace) Conclusion The depressing reality is that from first to last, in spite of the sound and the rage of Wallace's campaigning, little altered for the good in Alabama with his facilitation. All through his years in office, Alabama speeded near the foot of the states in per capita income, welfare, and expenditure on schools and pupils. "I don’t hate blacks. The day I said ‘segregation forever,’ I never said a thing that would upset a black person unless it was segregation. I never made fun of ‘em about inequality and all that kind of stuff. But my vehemence was against the federal government folks. I didn’t make people get mad against black people. I made ‘em get mad against the courts." (Shortly before his death) At the moment, America's schools are so deeply segregated that further than two-thirds of black and Hispanic students are in schools where a preponderance of the students are not white. And now, mainly of the nation's white children go to a school that is almost 80 percent white. Hispanics are at the present the main segregated group of students in the state because they live in extremely concerted bunches. Works Cited Top of Form   Carlson Jody; George C. Wallace and the Politics of Powerlessness, (1981), Marshall Frady, Wallace (1968). Pg 6-26, 39-58, 101-132, 142-169. Carter T. Dan; George Wallace, Richard Nixon and the Transformation of American Politics, Markham Press Fund, Waco, TX, (1992). Pg 3-52. Katsinas G. Stephen; George C. Wallace and the Founding of Alabama's Public Two-Year Colleges, Journal Title: Journal of Higher Education. Volume: 65. Issue: 4, (1994). Pg 447-501. Read More

For more than one hundred years, yeoman farmers from northern Alabama had waged a political guerrilla war against the reactionary black belt gentry and the state had, by Southern standards, a substantial organized labor movement in the state and a vigorous tradition of working class political activism. Few other Southern states had furnished liberal politicians to match Hugo Black, "Big Jim" Folsom, Lister Hill, and John Sparkman. George Wallace was no Strom Thurmond and his past support of New Deal liberalism (or "progressivism," as he preferred to call it) gave him an ear for the complex variant of populist conservatism that characterized blue-collar workers and disenchanted Democrats all over the nation.

The literature of George C. Wallace's four presidential campaigns and his influence on the national political scene is considerable and largely critical and negative in tone. Mostly ignored, however, has been his performance as governor of Alabama, and in particular, his record in the area of education. Elected four times to serve four-year terms in 1962, 1970, 1974, and again in 1982. 1960s, however, he sensed that millions of Americans were gripped by a sense of betrayal. Wallace was not an analytical thinker, but he instinctively grasped the depth and breadth of that sense of betrayal.

He knew that a substantial percentage of the American electorate reviled the civil rights protesters and anti-war demonstrators as indications of a fundamental turn down in the traditional cultural compass of God, family, and country; a turn down mirrored in the rising crime rates, legalization of abortion, the rise in out-of-wedlock pregnancies, the increase in divorce rates, the Supreme Court's verdict against school prayer, and the proliferation of "obscene" literature and films.

And moving always beneath the surface was the fear that blacks were moving beyond their safely encapsulated ghettos into "our" streets, "our" schools, "our" neighborhoods. At the core of his support was the same racist energy that had powered the Wallace domination of Alabama politics. Wallace, after all, had won the Alabama governorship in 1962 with his promise to maintain white supremacy; a promise he reaffirmed in his oft-quoted inaugural speech in early 1963.

"We sound the drum for freedom," he told an all-white audience as he stood on the spot where Jefferson Davis had taken the oath as President of the Confederate States of America. "It is very appropriate that from this cradle of the Confederacy, this very heart of the great Anglo-Saxon Southland, that today we sound the drum for freedom as have our generations of forebears before us time and again down through history. Let us rise to the call for freedom-loving blood that is in us and send our answer to the tyranny that clanks its chains upon the South.

In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever! ." (1963, George Wallace, first term as governor) The expressions he spoke at his 1963 opening, as governor of Alabama, became a uniting cry for those disparate to integration and abhorrence to the rising Civil Rights Movement. However, he is also the man who, as a moderator in the 1950s, frequently ruled in errand of black plaintiffs and commanded that lawyers take care of them with esteem.

“Law and order will always break down when you try to mix races here in our part of the country. I have nothing against people of opposite color. I got colored people - I have lived around them all of my life my children right now are being nursed by colored folks. I just don't believe in social and educational mixing”. (24th April, 1963, George Wallace talking to Robert Kennedy about segregation in Alabama) Within a year of becoming governor, Wallace made national headings by positioning alongside the federal government on the subject of integration.

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