As Jackson likes to end the story, it never seemed to cross Wallace’s mind that he could have just as easily have used force to stifle the Ku Kluxers who were supposedly lying in wait. That option simply didn’t occur to the former governor, not in his description of March 1965, not even in the fading weeks of a life for which he was trying to make amends: what chilling evidence of moral blindness, even from the clarity of the death bed.
When I read George Wallace Jr.’s column last night, I thought of that old piece of Wallace revisionism again, with the same mix of emotions. I hardly fault George Jr., whom I have dealt with cordially the few times our paths have crossed, for making his case. He is a son defending a father. But I have to engage the broader argument he makes about the legacy of his father, and what he gets so deeply wrong about the moral climate of Alabama and the South in the mid-’60s.
Bluntly put, Governor Wallace circa 1965 was no peacemaker. A peacemaker would have denounced the murder of four children in Birmingham 18 months earlier. There was no thread of peace in his inaugural pledge in 1963 to resist racial equality in the name of people who had once waged a civil war. Nor was George Wallace a principled conservative who was just raising “constitutional questions” about integration or federal overreach. To the contrary, his principle was a crude set of lies: the ugly conviction that a black American is less of a citizen than a white one, and that states’ rights meant giving the South free sanction to lock black people in their undignified place until local customs saw fit to change. That is not conservatism, it is unalloyed white racial supremacy.
Did Wallace truly have “no sense of ill feeling, malice or hate toward black people,” as his son testifies? I have no idea what was in his heart. But if it was hate-free, he gave as skillful and as energetic a performance of hate as Southern politics has seen in the last century. If it is true that the tactical choices in Selma got away from Wallace, as George Jr. argues, it ought to be remembered that neither Col. Al Lingo nor Sheriff Clark were ever publicly rebuked by the governor. Lingo kept his job as the leader of Alabama’s state troopers. What kind of leader stays silent if Bloody Sunday is something he genuinely abhorred?
Of course the redemptive years ought to count in evaluating Wallace’s record (they would count for more if they had been more substance than rhetoric, if Wallace’s last term as governor, secured with black votes, had actually attacked poverty in the Black Belt, or revamped a state tax structure that drains poor people). But George Jr. asks for more than a full accounting, he asks for a reinvention of his father. He offers up an alternative history, one where Wallace was a frustrated would-be conciliator who did the best he could; and was just his generation’s version of an anti-Washington conservative populist.
The Wallace who rings true is the one Tim Roth (the actor who plays Wallace) evokes in one of “Selma’s” richest scenes: the Oval Office encounter between the unrepentant governor and Lyndon Johnson after Bloody Sunday. Here, Johnson tries to appeal to Wallace’s sense of history by demanding that he look to how America and the South in 1985 would judge their actions in Selma. Wallace responds with a sneer that he did not care what 1985 thought of him. It is the sneer of a man who lived for power in his time, who could have cared less about the future because there were no votes there and whose neglect of his state’s conditions still haunts it. Whatever the state of his soul when he died, his actions suggested that this George Wallace was the real one. And the cruelty of his legacy lives on and warps Alabama to this day.
Artur Davis is the former representative from Alabama’s 7th Congressional District.
