Governor Wallace Quotes

When we think of racism we think of Governor Wallace of Alabama blocking the schoolhouse door; we think of water hoses, lynchings, racial epithets, and "whites only" signs. These images make it easy to forget that many wonderful, goodhearted white people who were generous to others, respectful of their neighbors, and even kind to their black maids, gardeners, or shoe shiners--and wished them well--nevertheless went to the polls and voted for racial segregation... Our understanding of racism is therefore shaped by the most extreme expressions of individual bigotry, not by the way in which it functions naturally, almost invisibly (and sometimes with genuinely benign intent), when it is embedded in the structure of a social system.

When SCLC went into Selma in January 1965, it had limited objectives. It sought primarily to correct wrongs existing in that small city. But our adversaries met us with such unrestrained brutality that they enlarged the issues to a national scale. The ironic and splendid result of the small Selma project was nothing less than the Voting Rights Act of 1965. For the aid Governor Wallace and Sheriff Clark gave us in our legislative objectives, SCLC tendered them its warm appreciation.

Remember Martin L. King’s organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference? When it staged marches in Alabama, that state’s governor, George Wallace, called the organization’s members “professional agitators with pro-Communist affiliations.” Sound familiar? How close to “outside agitators”! The phrase begs the question: outside of what? The state? America? This country is called the United States of America, founded upon a national Constitution. Do all citizens have the right to protest, or just some? Is what happened to Mike Brown a local matter, or is his unjustifiable killing actually a national issue? It’s not the job of media to police protests—deciding who are “good” demonstrators, who are “bad” ones. Their job is to report what is happening, period. Were it not for these protests, let us be frank, the mass media would’ve ignored the crimes police committed against Michael Brown, against his family, against his community, and against his fellow citizens—us. If media were doing their job, reporting on the vicious violence launched against young Blacks the nation over, perhaps Michael Brown would be alive today. Let us look at the cops, almost 98 percent of whom are outsiders to Ferguson. They work there, they kill there, but they don’t live there. They dwell in neighboring, whiter counties and towns. Who are the real outside agitators?

One day Wallace was fishing in the Irvine when Earl Percy, the governor of Ayr, rode past with a numerous train. Five of them remained behind and asked Wallace for the fish he had taken. He replied that they were welcome to half of them. Not satisfied with this, they seized the basket and prepared to carry it off. Wallace resisted, and one of them drew his sword. Wallace seized the staff of his net and struck his opponent's sword from his hand; this he snatched up and stood on guard, while the other four rushed upon him. Wallace smote the first so terrible a blow that his head was cloven from skull to collar-bone; with the next blow he severed the right arm of another, and then disabled a third. The other two fled, and overtaking the earl, called on him for help; "for," they said, "three of our number who stayed behind with us to take some fish from the Scot who was fishing are killed or disabled." How many were your assailants?" asked the earl. But the man himself," they answered; "a desperate fellow whom we could not withstand." I have a brave company of followers!" the earl said with scorn. "You allow one Scot to overmatch five of you! I shall not return to seek for your adversary; for were I to find him I should respect him too much to do him harm.

The accomplishment of the testimony was two-fold: It changed the death of Marshall from suicide to death by gunshot, and it brought into light bespectacled Johnson hit man, Malcolm “Mac” Wallace. At one point, Wallace, a former marine who had been the president of the University of Texas student body, had strong political aspirations. In 1946, Wallace was an organizer for Homer Rainey’s campaign for governor.44 Wallace eventually became indebted to Johnson, and the closest he would ever get to political office would be in administering of carnage for Johnson and his Texas business associates. Wallace was the Mr. X at the gas station asking Nolan Griffin for directions. Described as a “hatchet man”45 for Johnson by Lyndon’s mistress Madeleine Brown, Wallace was an important link in many of the murders connected to Johnson. Estes’s lawyer, Douglas Caddy, revealed Wallace’s and Johnson’s complicity in Texas-style justice in a letter to Stephan S. Trott at the US Department of Justice: My client, Mr. Estes, has authorized me to make this reply to your letter of May 29, 1984. Mr. Estes was a member of a four-member group, headed by Lyndon Johnson, which committed criminal acts in Texas in the 1960’s. The other two, besides Mr. Estes and LBJ, were Cliff Carter and Mack Wallace. Mr. Estes is willing to disclose his knowledge concerning the following criminal offenses: Murders 1.   The killing of Henry Marshall 2.   The killing of George Krutilek 3.   The killing of Ike Rogers and his secretary 4.   The killing of Coleman Wade 5.   The killing of Josefa Johnson 6.   The killing of John Kinser 7.   The killing of President J. F. Kennedy46

Successful con men are treated with considerable respect in the South. A good slice of the settler population of that region were men who’d been given a choice between being shipped off to the New World in leg-irons and spending the rest of their lives in English prisons. The Crown saw no point in feeding them year after year, and they were far too dangerous to be turned loose on the streets of London—so, rather than overload the public hanging schedule, the King’s Minister of Gaol decided to put this scum to work on the other side of the Atlantic, in The Colonies, where cheap labor was much in demand. Most of these poor bastards wound up in what is now the Deep South because of the wretched climate. No settler with good sense and a few dollars in his pocket would venture south of Richmond. There was plenty of opportunity around Boston, New York, and Philadelphia—and by British standards the climate in places like South Carolina and Georgia was close to Hell on Earth: swamps, alligators, mosquitoes, tropical disease... all this plus a boiling sun all day long and no way to make money unless you had a land grant from the King... So the South was sparsely settled at first, and the shortage of skilled labor was a serious problem to the scattered aristocracy of would-be cotton barons who’d been granted huge tracts of good land that would make them all rich if they could only get people to work it. The slave-trade was one answer, but Africa in 1699 was not a fertile breeding ground for middle-management types... and the planters said it was damn near impossible for one white man to establish any kind of control over a boatload of black primitives. The bastards couldn’t even speak English. How could a man get the crop in, with brutes like that for help? There would have to be managers, keepers, overseers: white men who spoke the language, and had a sense of purpose in life. But where would they come from? There was no middle class in the South: only masters and slaves... and all that rich land lying fallow. The King was quick to grasp the financial implications of the problem: The crops must be planted and harvested, in order to sell them for gold—and if all those lazy bastards needed was a few thousand half-bright English-speaking lackeys in order to bring the crops in... hell, that was easy: Clean out the jails, cut back on the Crown’s grocery bill, jolt the liberals off balance by announcing a new “Progressive Amnesty” program for hardened criminals.... Wonderful. Dispatch royal messengers to spread the good word in every corner of the kingdom; and after that send out professional pollsters to record an amazing 66 percent jump in the King’s popularity... then wait a few weeks before announcing the new 10 percent sales tax on ale. That’s how the South got settled. Not the whole story, perhaps, but it goes a long way toward explaining why George Wallace is the Governor of Alabama. He has the same smile as his great-grandfather—a thrice-convicted pig thief from somewhere near Nottingham, who made a small reputation, they say, as a jailhouse lawyer, before he got shipped out. With a bit of imagination you can almost hear the cranky little bastard haranguing his fellow prisoners in London jail, urging them on to revolt: “Lissen here, you poor fools! There’s not much time! Even now—up there in the tower—they’re cookin up some kind of cruel new punishment for us! How much longer will we stand for it? And now they want to ship us across the ocean to work like slaves in a swamp with a bunch of goddamn Hottentots! “We won’t go! It’s asinine! We’ll tear this place apart before we’ll let that thieving old faggot of a king send us off to work next to Africans! “How much more of this misery can we stand, boys? I know you’re fed right up to here with it. I can see it in your eyes— pure misery! And I’m tellin’ you, we don’t have to stand for it!...

In the Spring of 1962, a white postal worker from Baltimore, William Moore, decided to use his ten-day vacation to showcase his passion for Civil Rights.  Moore planned a “Freedom Walk” from Chattanooga, Tennessee, across Alabama, to Jackson, Mississippi, where he would confront Governor Ross Barnett about the injustice of racial segregation.      Moore, who had a history of psychiatric illness, entered Alabama wearing signs that read MISSISSIPPI OR BUST, END SEGREGATION IN AMERICA, and EQUAL RIGHTS FOR ALL MEN.  The much-publicized march ended tragically, when Moore's body was found on a roadside near Gadsen, Alabama—he had been shot to death.

It was only after World War II that Stanford began to emerge as a center of technical excellence, owing largely to the campaigns of Frederick Terman, dean of the School of Engineering and architect-of-record of the military-industrial-academic complex that is Silicon Valley. During World War II Terman had been tapped by his own mentor, presidential science advisor Vannevar Bush, to run the secret Radio Research Lab at Harvard and was determined to capture a share of the defense funding the federal government was preparing to redirect toward postwar academic research. Within a decade he had succeeded in turning the governor’s stud farm into the Stanford Industrial Park, instituted a lucrative honors cooperative program that provided a camino real for local companies to put selected employees through a master’s degree program, and overseen major investments in the most promising areas of research. Enrollments rose by 20 percent, and over one-third of entering class of 1957 started in the School of Engineering—more than double the national average.4 As he rose from chairman to dean to provost, Terman was unwavering in his belief that engineering formed the heart of a liberal education and labored to erect his famous “steeples of excellence” with strategic appointments in areas such as semiconductors, microwave electronics, and aeronautics. Design, to the extent that it was a recognized field at all, remained on the margins, the province of an older generation of draftsmen and machine builders who were more at home in the shop than the research laboratory—a situation Terman hoped to remedy with a promising new hire from MIT: “The world has heard very little, if anything, of engineering design at Stanford,” he reported to President Wallace Sterling, “but they will be hearing about it in the future.

In the mid-1950s, Governor Luther Hodges cited Aycock’s “march of progress” in his defense of Jim Crow as a system that both ensured political tranquility and enabled racial uplift. His successor in the state house, Terry Sanford, noted that Aycock famously proclaimed “as a white man, I am afraid of but one thing for my race and that is we shall become afraid to give the Negro a fair chance. The white man in the South can never attain to his fullest growth until he does absolute justice to the Negro race.” This framing enabled Hodges, Sanford, and, later, Governor Dan Moore to define the “North Carolina way” in sharp contrast with the racially charged massive resistance rhetoric that defined the approaches of Alabama under George Wallace and Mississippi under Ross Barnett. This moderate course caused early observers like V. O. Key to view the state as “an inspiring exception to southern racism.” Crucially, it operated hand-in-hand with North Carolina’s anti-labor stance to advance the state’s economic interests. Hodges, Sanford, and Moore approached racial policy by emphasizing tranquility, and thus an intolerance for political contention. These officials placed a high value on law and order, condemning as “extremists” those who threatened North Carolina’s “harmonious” race relations by advocating either civil rights or staunch segregation. While racial distinctions could not be elided in the Jim Crow South, where the social fabric was shot through with racial disparity, an Aycock-style progressivist stance emphasized the maintenance of racial separation alongside white elites’ moral and civic interest in the well-being of black residents. This interest generally took the form of a pronounced paternalism, which typically enabled powerful white residents to serve as benefactors to their black neighbors, in a sort of patron-client relationship. “It was white people doing something for blacks—not with them,” explained Charlotte-based Reverend Colemon William Kerry Jr. While often framed as gestures of beneficence and closeness, such acts reproduced inequity and distance. More broadly, this racial order served dominant economic and political interests, as it preserved segregation with a progressive sheen that favored industrial expansion.12

massive pressure was brought to bear on Johnson to mobilize the National Guard to protect the marchers who planned to resume their walk to Montgomery. Pickets surrounded the White House carrying placards designed to shame the president into action: “LBJ, open your eyes, see the sickness of the South, see the horrors of your homeland.” Despite the terrible pressure, Johnson deemed the moment had not yet come. He feared “that a hasty display of federal force at this time would destroy whatever possibilities existed for the passage of voting rights legislation.” As a southerner, he knew well that the sending of federal troops would revive bitter memories of Reconstruction and risk transforming Alabama’s governor George Wallace into a martyr for states’ rights. “We had to have a real victory for the black people,” he insisted, “not a psychological victory for the North.

As a society, our collective understanding of racism has been powerfully influenced by the shocking images of the Jim Crow era and the struggle for civil rights. When we think of racism we think of Governor Wallace of Alabama blocking the schoolhouse door; we think of water hoses, lynchings, racial epithets, and “whites only” signs. These images make it easy to forget that many wonderful, good-hearted white people who were generous to others, respectful of their neighbors, and even kind to their black maids, gardeners, or shoe shiners—and wished them well—nevertheless went to the polls and voted for racial segregation.

George Wallace, who had been Governor of Alabama during the worst of the troubles there. Wallace had a knack of appealing to racists by inflammatory words and deeds,

As a society, our collective understanding of racism has been powerfully influenced by the shocking images of the Jim Crow era and the struggle for civil rights. When we think of racism we think of Governor Wallace of Alabama blocking the schoolhouse door; we think of water hoses, lynchings, racial epithets, and "whites only" signs. These images make it easy to forget that many wonderful, good-hearted white people who were generous to others, respectful of their neighbors, and even kind to their black maids, gardeners, or shoe shiners—and wished them well—nevertheless went to the polls and voted for racial segregation. Many whites who supported Jim Crow justified it on paternalist grounds, actually believing they were doing blacks a favor or believing the time was not yet "right" for equality. The disturbing images from the Jim Crow era also make it easy to forget that many African Americans were complicit in the Jim Crow system, profiting from it directly or indirectly or keeping their objections quiet out of fear of the repercussions. Our understanding of racism is therefore shaped by the most extreme expressions of individual bigotry, not by the way in which it functions naturally, almost invisibly (and sometimes with genuinely benign intent), when it is embedded in the structure of a social system.

Al Sharpton has done more damage to the black cause than George Wallace [segregationist Alabama Governor]. He has suffocated the decent black leaders in New York,” — “His transparent venal blackmail and extortion schemes taint all black leadership.” Diary bombshell: RFK’s slams against Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson and Gov. Cuomo

bellowing with a crack in his voice, “Get out of here! Get out of here! You are an outrage!” That berserk charge-anarchic and hopeless, an abandonment of fairness, proprieties, all civilized approaches, a retreat to simple brute action-testified not only to despair and fury over the fact that this man could be speaking there at all, but to a sinking of the heart over the absurdly serious import of that figure's audacious aspirations, a dread that something sinister and implacable was afoot in the land. As he was hustled offstage during the short melee, he glanced quickly back over his shoulder at the furor with a curious, bemused, almost awed expression.

In this time, if there is an ominous conspiracy underway in the United States, it would be the silent massive suspicion of a conspiracy which threatens home, job, status, the accustomed order of life.

Let 'em call me a racist. It don't make any difference. Whole heap of folks in this country feel the same way I do. Race is what's gonna win this thing for me.

Hell, we got too much dignity in government now, what we need is some meanness.

At a patio party recently in New Orleans' French Quarter, an oil millionaire from Dallas allowed, “I'd vote for him in a minute, and give him all the money I could, if I just felt I could trust him-if he wouldn't wind up getting tamed by Washington like Lester Maddox over there in Georgia. I'm a Republican, but I'd love to support him, and every one of my friends-oilmen, fellows in wheat-feel the same way.

When Governor Wallace was reported recovering and able to receive visitors at Holy Cross Hospital in Silver Spring, Maryland, I went to pay him a call. No two candidates, perhaps no two people, could differ more vehemently on many issues of public policy, but I could not see that this ought to have any relationship to our private behavior toward each other. With one of my Congressional staff aides and several Secret Service men, I drove out and spent twenty minutes with him. Governor Wallace seemed sincerely touched. He cried for a moment, and so did I. "Is that really you, Shirley?" he asked. "Have you come to see me?" What we talked about was nothing earthshaking; it was like almost any other sick call. I did say at one point, "You and I don't agree, but you've been shot, and I might be shot, and we are both children of American democracy, so I wanted to come and see you.

If young George felt closer to his grandfather than to his own father, it was probably because George Wallace, Sr., was almost totally absorbed in a ceaseless, savage, losing cat-fight with life.

On a bright winter morning in 1966, seizing another cigarette from the pack on her metal desk and igniting it with a quick snap of her lighter, she mused, “Of course, somebody's gonna get George sooner or later. I've accepted that. He's gonna get it. My only consolation is, when it happens, he'll be doing the only thing he's ever cared about doing anyway.

In Alabama Wallace has managed to pass the point of being just the most popular politician in the memory of the state. He has become a Folk Hero. Alabama, along with the rest of the South, has been changing into something more like the rest of the nation, and in the process, a particular devastation is being worked among its people. In his transition from the gentle earth to the city-the filling stations, the power lines, the merciless asphalt, the neon Jumboburger drive-ins-the Southern yeoman has acquired a quality of metallic ferocity.

In fact, what makes Wallace the ultimate demagogue is that, behind his indefatigable scrambling, his ferocious concentration, his inexhaustible ambition, there seems to lurk a secret, desperate suspicion that facing him, aside from and beyond his political existence, is nothingness- an empty, terrible white blank. It's as if, when the time finally arrives for him to cease to be a politician, he will simply cease to be.

Toward the close of the campaign, a day was spent in the state's largest city, Birmingham. It is, in Alabama, the closest thing to alien turf for Wallace, not only because of its relative sophistication, but because the Republican party is particularly robust there.

So you think someone is going to shoot at me twice in one campaign cycle?" Sticking out her hand, she started counting off on her fingers. "Reagan, Johnson, Nixon, Carter. They've all had over fifty assassination attempts. Some over a hundred!" His sisters were the earth's most annoying creatures. "Those are all presidents. And they all survived the attempts." "William Goebel, gubernatorial candidate. George Wallace, gubernatorial candidate." "You're in the wrong century." "And you're underestimating the power of racial hatred," she snapped. "Bill Richardson, Deval Patrick, Bobby Jindal, David Paterson, Susana Martinez, Michelle Grisham-" "And listing all the minority governors from this century proves what?" she snapped again. "It proves that we can run for elections without ending up dead.

In 1973, New York governor Nelson Rockefeller signed into law the Rockefeller Drug Laws, which mandated harsh minimum sentences of fifteen years for the sale or possession of even small amounts of marijuana, cocaine, or heroin. Years later, statistics would show that almost 90 percent of those convicted under these laws were either Black or Latino. And throughout the 1970s, Black folks were twice as likely as white people to be arrested on drug-related offenses. By the eighties, when the young Christopher Wallace was sitting on the stoop, that number ballooned to five times as likely.

Car radios blared in the night, generally pitting a gang in favor of Neil Young’s “Southern Man,” which chastised the South for its flagrant racism, against those who preferred Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama,” which chastised Neil Young for chastising the South and which praised the blatantly racist Alabama governor George Wallace.

The misunderstanding is not surprising. As a society, our collective understanding of racism has been powerfully influenced by the shocking images of the Jim Crow era and the struggle for civil rights. When we think of racism we think of Governor Wallace of Alabama blocking the schoolhouse door; we think of water hoses, lynchings, racial epithets, and “whites only” signs. These images make it easy to forget that many wonderful, goodhearted white people who were generous to others, respectful of their neighbors, and even kind to their black maids, gardeners, or shoe shiners—and wished them well—nevertheless went to the polls and voted for racial segregation. Many

decade later, Alabama governor George Wallace’s defiant segregationist stance vaulted him to national prominence, leading to surprisingly vigorous bids for the presidency in 1968 and 1972.