Реферат: George Wallace Essay Research Paper Former Gov

Democratic Party that still had “White Supremacy” emblazoned on its ballot

emblem.

After this blooding in state and national politics, Wallace settled in as

an elected district judge in his home county, serving from 1953 to 1958

and all the while laying plans to run for governor in 1958.

It was in the preparation of that race and its aftermath that Wallace

committed two betrayals — one personal and one political — that

blemished his reputation for life, but also gave him a generationlong

stranglehold on Alabama politics.

The first came after 1958, when Wallace’s surprisingly strong dark-horse

candidacy failed. He had followed the tolerant racial line laid down by

Folsom and lost to John Patterson, whose devotion to massive resistance to

court-ordered integration won him the following of the Ku Klux Klan. There

were only about 5,000 Klan members, Patterson later recalled, but they

helped him paper the state with campaign literature.

Later, Wallace, in a quotation whose authenticity he long disputed, was

recorded as saying that no one “will ever out out-nigger me again.”

Even if not literally true, the remark defined the strategy Wallace would

use to ride to power. He started the very next year when his law school

friend Frank Johnson, now a federal judge with a strong civil rights

record, ordered Wallace’s court to surrender voter-registration records to

the United States Civil Rights Commission. Wallace denounced Johnson in

public as a federal dictator, but conspired secretly to avoid being jailed

on federal contempt charges by having a local grand jury surrender the

records on his behalf.

Johnson ruled that Wallace had used “devious means,” but had nonetheless

obeyed the federal court order. Never one to be embarrassed by the facts,

Wallace labeled Johnson a “carpet-bagging, scalawagging liar” who wanted

to mount “a second Sherman’s March to the Sea.”