Реферат: George Wallace Essay Research Paper Former Gov

the end of his last term in January 1987.

So great was his sway over Alabama that by the time he had been in office

only two years, other candidates literally begged him for permission to

put his slogan, “Stand Up for Alabama,” on their billboards. Sens. John

Sparkman and Lister Hill, New Deal veterans who were powers in Washington

and the national Democratic Party, feared to contradict him in public when

he vowed to plunge the state into unrelenting confrontation with the

federal government over the integration of schools, buses, restrooms and

public places in Alabama.

It was a power built entirely on his promise to Alabama’s white voting

majority to continue the historic oppression of its disfranchised and

largely impoverished black citizens. And it was snapshots of the peak

moments of Wallace’s campaign of racial oppression that burned him into

the nation’s consciousness as the Deep South’s most forceful political

brawler since Huey Long of Louisiana.

First, on Jan. 14, 1963, there was his inaugural address, written by a

known Ku Klux Klansman, Asa Carter. In it, Wallace promised to protect the

state’s “Anglo-Saxon people” from “communistic amalgamation” with blacks

and ended with the line that would haunt his later efforts to enter the

Democratic mainstream: “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation

forever.”

Wallace’s next signature moment came on June 11, 1963, when he mounted his

“stand in the schoolhouse door” to block two black students, Vivian Malone

and James Hood, from enrolling at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa.

Within days, it was convincingly reported that Wallace, fearing jail for

defying a federal court order, had privately promised President John

Kennedy that he would step aside if first allowed to make a defiant

speech.

Wallace’s in-state critics denounced him for a “charade” that embarrassed