Реферат: George Wallace Essay Research Paper Former Gov

establishment newspapers never did understand that segregation wasn’t

about hate. I didn’t hate anybody. I don’t hate the man who shot me. When

I was young, I used to swim and play with blacks all the time. You find

more hate in New York, Chicago and Washington, D.C., than in all the

Southern states put together.”

As part of his rehabilitation effort, Wallace sought meetings with civil

rights figures like the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, the Rev. Jesse Jackson and

Rep. John Lewis, whose beating on “Bloody Sunday” at Selma galvanzied the

voting-rights crusade. Wallace made a well-publicized appearance at King’s

old church in Montgomery. Sometimes he even managed to use the magic words

“I’m sorry.”

After Wallace left office in 1987, Alabamians continued to support him

through a figurehead position at Troy State University. By the time he

died, Republicans had taken over the governorship, and Wallace’s main

legacy, a statewide system of trade schools, junior colleges, and small

four-year institutions, was regarded as a monument to educational waste

and redundancy that a poor state could ill afford.

One of his last public appearances was in the Spike Lee documentary “Four

Little Girls,” which tells the story of the 16th Street Baptist Church

bombing. In his interview, Wallace insists that his best friend in the

world was a black orderly. The obviously uncomfortable orderly keeps

trying to walk out of the frame only to be tugged back by Wallace. In

public showings, that passage of the film usually drew laughter.

So ended the public career that saw Wallace move from being the most

feared politician of his era to a pitiable relic. It is a career whose

moral arc seemed, in retrospect, utterly predictable and utterly of a

piece with the Faulknerian idea of racism’s ineradicable curse. At the

height of his powers, George Wallace denied any moral responsibility for

the violent acts that racked his state. And in his Bible-haunted state,