During an outdoor rally in Laurel, Maryland, George Wallace, the governor of Alabama and a presidential candidate, is shot by 21-year-old Arthur Bremer. Three others were wounded, and Wallace was permanently paralyzed from the waist down. The next day, while fighting for his life in a hospital, he won major primary victories in Michigan and Maryland. On June 8, Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman elected to Congress and one of Wallaces opponents for the Democratic nomination, famously visited him in the hospital to wish him well. He remained in the hospital for several months, bringing his third presidential campaign to an irrevocable end.
Wallace, one of the most controversial politicians in U.S. history, was elected governor of Alabama in 1962 under an ultra-segregationist platform. In his 1963 inaugural address, Wallace promised his white followers: “Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!” However, the promise lasted only six months. In June 1963, under federal pressure, he was forced to end his blockade of the University of Alabama and allow the enrollment of African American students.
Despite his failures in slowing the accelerating civil rights movement in the South, Wallace became a national spokesman for resistance to racial change and in 1964 entered the race for the U.S. presidency. Although defeated in most Democratic presidential primaries he entered, his modest successes demonstrated the extent of popular backlash against integration. In 1968, he made another strong run as the candidate of the American Independent Party and managed to get on the ballot in all 50 states. On Election Day, he drew 10 million votes from across the country.
In 1972, Governor Wallace returned to the Democratic Party for his third presidential campaign and, under a slightly more moderate platform, was showing promising returns when Arthur Bremer shot him on May 15, 1972. After his recovery, he faded from national prominence and made a poor showing in his fourth and final presidential campaign in 1979. During the 1980s, Wallace’s politics shifted dramatically, especially in regard to race. He contacted civil rights leaders he had so forcibly opposed in the past and asked their forgiveness. In time, he gained the political support of Alabama’s growing African American electorate and in 1983 was elected Alabama governor for the last time with their overwhelming support. During the next four years, the man who had promised segregation forever made more African American political appointments than any other figure in Alabama history.
He announced his retirement in 1986, telling the Alabama electorate in a tearful address that “I’ve climbed my last political mountain, but there are still some personal hills I must climb. But for now, I must pass the rope and the pick to another climber and say climb on, climb on to higher heights. Climb on ’til you reach the very peak. Then look back and wave at me. I, too, will still be climbing.” He died in 1998.
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Did I ever mention that I attended a George Wallace campaign rally in Madison Square Garden with my dad in 1968 … and that I screamed as loud as I could “FUCK YOU NIGGERS!!!” at the section of Kneegrows about 10 rows behind us …. and that this freaked my dad the fuck out …. but, during the bus ride back home he said I did a good thing?
Ahhh, the good old days, where men were men, and the sheep were afraid.
Why were Negroes at a GW convention?
If they were there to support, or at least listen to what he had to say, why would you yell at them?
MSG holds about 20,000 people. Whatever the actual number, greater than 99% was white.
The Kneegrows were all in ONE section … the one we were practically next to. They weren’t there to support or listen to Wallace. They came to DISRUPT the speech.
Throughout Wallace’s speech these pre-BLM ass-clowns — about 100 or so … would jeer, curse, and heckle. At one point Wallace even told them to shut up. That’s why I … and that whole side of MSG … yelled at those porch monkeys.
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Wallace’s running mate, General Curtis LeMay …. don’t know if he was fucking nuts, or a truth teller.
This cigar chomping manly man earned the nickname “Iron Ass” for his stubbornness and shortness once his mind was made up. He was the youngest Air Force General ever to wear a fourth star. It was his command that dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
I believe that during the Cuban Missile Crisis he wanted Kennedy to deliver every nuclear warhead in the American arsenal on the Soviet Union at once.
When a Harvard study found Army pilots were aborting bombing missions over Germany out of fear, LeMay personally led every bombing sortie and ordered any crew who didn’t go over the target be court-martialed.
Following are his quotes. It’s a fun read!! Full of testosterone and vigor.
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If you are going to use military force, then you ought to use overwhelming military force. Use too much and deliberately use too much; you’ll save lives, not only your own, but the enemy’s too.
If we maintain our faith in God, love of freedom, and superior global air power, the future looks good.
I think there are many times when it would be most efficient to use nuclear weapons. However, the public opinion in this country and throughout the world throw up their hands in horror when you mention nuclear weapons, just because of the propaganda that’s been fed to them.
I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal…. Every soldier thinks something of the moral aspects of what he is doing. But all war is immoral and if you let that bother you, you’re not a good soldier.
I don’t mind being called tough, since I find in this racket it’s the tough guys who lead the survivors.
You’ve got to kill people, and when you’ve killed enough they stop fighting.
My solution to the problem would be to tell [the North Vietnamese Communists] frankly that they’ve got to draw in their horns and stop their aggression or we’re going to bomb them into the Stone Age. And we would shove them back into the Stone Age with Air power or Naval power – not with ground forces.
There are no innocent civilians, so it doesn’t bother me so much to be killing innocent bystanders.
We went over there and fought the war and eventually burned down every town in North Korea anyway, someway or another, and some in South Korea too. Over a period of three years or so, we killed off – what – twenty percent of the population of Korea as direct casualties of war, or from starvation and exposure?
To err is human, to forgive is not SAC policy.
Native annalists may look sadly back from the future on that period when we had the atomic bomb and the Russians didn’t. Or when the Russians had acquired (through connivance and treachery of Westerns with warped minds) the atomic bomb – and yet still didn’t have any stockpile of the weapons. That was the era when we might have destroyed Russia completely and not even skinned our elbows doing it.
Sometime in the future – 25, 50, 75 years hence – what will the situation be like then? By that time the Chinese will have the capability of delivery too.
You [President Kennedy] have made some pretty strong statements about their being defensive and that we would take action against offensive weapons. I think that a blockade and political talk would be considered by a lot of our friends and neutrals as being a pretty weak response to this [the Cuban missile crisis]. And I’m sure a lot of our own citizens would feel that way too. In other words, you’re in a pretty bad fix at the present time.
Killing Japanese didn’t bother me very much at that time.
If I see that the Russians are amassing their planes for an attack, I’m going to knock the shit out of them before they take off the ground.