SYMHC Classics: George Wallace

This 2016 episode covers George Wallace, one of the most prominent voices against the Civil Rights Movement and its objectives. He spent multiple campaigns for both governor and president on an explicitly pro-segregation platform. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Holly Frey?

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• 2:17Tracy V. Wilson?

  Happy Saturday. This week, when we talked about the Camden 28, we mentioned that there was a George Wallace campaign rally during that trial. Today, George Wallace is better known for his time as governor of Alabama, but at the time, he was running for president.

• 2:34Holly Frey?

  Our episode on George Wallace originally came out on November 29, 2016, and it is today's Saturday classic.

• 2:44Holly Frey?

  Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio.

• 2:55Tracy V. Wilson?

  Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson.

• 2:58Holly Frey?

  And I'm Holly Frey.

• 2:59Tracy V. Wilson?

  Over the past few years, Holly, you and I have talked about a number of prominent figures and moments in the civil rights movement.

• 3:05Holly Frey?

  That is correct.

• 3:07Tracy V. Wilson?

  So we've talked about people like Rosa Parks and Bayard Rustin, and we've talked about Supreme Court decisions like Brown versus Board and Loving versus Virginia, organizations like the Brotherhood of Sleeping Carporters. But other than talking sort of obliquely about the laws and practices and social systems that have enforced segregation and discrimination in the United States, as well as talking about some specific incidents of racist violence, like the destruction of the Greenwood District in Tulsa, Oklahoma, we've never really talked about the opposition to that movement. So today, we are talking about one of the most prominent voices against the civil rights movement and its objectives,

• 3:50Tracy V. Wilson?

  Alabama Governor George Wallace, who spent multiple campaigns for both governor and president on an explicitly pro-segregation platform. In his 1963 inaugural address as governor of Alabama, he famously proclaimed segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever. So we're going to be talking about violent retaliation against the civil rights movement that happened during his terms in office. And we're also going to be talking a lot about his first wife, Lurleen. He was married other times, so we're not really getting into that at all. But we are going to talk about Lurleen, whose own story is both tied directly to her husband's political career and includes a pretty disturbing account of medical neglect.

• 4:37Holly Frey?

  So George Corley Wallace Jr. was born on August 25th of 1919 in southeastern Alabama, where his father was a farmer. His political career started very early, at the age of 15, when he served as a government page at the Alabama State Capitol and made up his mind to return one day as governor. In his high school years, he was also a boxer, winning two state titles in that sport.

• 5:03Tracy V. Wilson?

  Wallace studied at the University of Alabama, paying his tuition by waiting tables and boxing. He graduated in 1937 and then finished his law degree in 1942. That same year, at the age of 24, he met Lurleen Burns, who was then 16, while she was working at a five-and-dime in Tuscaloosa. She had graduated from high school early, and she was working there to try to save up money to go to nursing school. George was already very interested in politics, something that didn't really interest Lurleen at all, but they quickly became inseparable.

• 5:35Holly Frey?

  Not long after they met, Wallace was inducted into the US Army Air Corps to serve in World War II. He and Lurleen got married on May 21st of 1943, while he was on leave after having contracted meningitis. They spent their honeymoon in a friend's guest room, although George spent a lot of his time out talking politics.

• 5:57Tracy V. Wilson?

  While he was still stateside, Lurleen traveled back and forth between her parents' home in Alabama and the air bases where he was stationed. This included a trip to New Mexico, which she made with their five-month-old daughter Bobby Jo, only to find that George had not arranged housing for them on the base. They wound up needing to stay in a converted chicken coop.

• 6:15Holly Frey?

  Soon, George would be stationed in the Pacific, where he flew incendiary missions over Japan until being medically discharged for severe anxiety in 1945.

• 6:27Tracy V. Wilson?

  In 1946, he started actively pursuing a political career. He became assistant to the state attorney general, and in 1947, he was elected to the Alabama State Legislature as representative for the first of his two terms. During his campaign, Lurleen was the family's sole breadwinner.

• 6:44Holly Frey?

  He was elected a judge for the Third Judicial Court in 1953, a position that he retained until 1958. And this job came with enough income for him to buy a home for the family. Up until this point, they had been living in a variety of rented rooms and garage apartments. And his nickname became Fighting Little Judge, both for his toughness from the bench and his former time as a boxer while he was in school.

• 7:11Tracy V. Wilson?

  Over the same time, he and Lurleen had two more children, Peggy Sue, born in 1950, and George Corley Wallace III, known as George Jr. in 1951. And Lurleen was increasingly frustrated by her husband's devotion to politics, often to the neglect of his family.

• 7:28Holly Frey?

  At this point in his career, people were calling George Wallace, quote, "a dangerous liberal." He was part of charismatic Governor Big Jim Folsom's reelection campaign in 1953. Folsom was also Wallace's mentor, and in later years would be described as being way ahead of his time in terms of social progress and racial equality. Folsom's positions during his career included things like voting rights for Black people, an end to prison labor, better schools, funding for roads to make it easier for farmers to get their crops to market, and more government positions for women. Much of this, of course, was an uphill battle and ultimately failed.

• 8:09Tracy V. Wilson?

  A lot of Wallace's policies in the earlier part of his career mostly mirrored Folsom's. During his two terms in the state legislature, he drafted legislation to promote vocational schools and attract manufacturing jobs to Alabama. In 1948, when pro-segregation Dixiecrats walked out of the Democratic National Convention, both Wallace and Folsom stayed put.

• 8:31Holly Frey?

  While in office in the State House of Representatives, Wallace sponsored a bill that taxed alcohol to fund trade schools. The Wallace Act, which was signed in 1951 and was half of what became known as the Wallace Cater Acts, allowed municipalities to sell bonds in order to fund industrial development. This was part of an effort to bring jobs to Alabama and diversify the state's economy. Critics called the Wallace Cater Acts "socialistic." Another criticism was that most of the industries that moved into Alabama through the Act's incentive were low-wage, non-union work that paid lower than the national average.

• 9:12Tracy V. Wilson?

  In 1958, Wallace embarked on his first campaign to be the governor of Alabama. He continued on with the kind of populist policies and relatively moderate positions on racial equality that he had up until this point. Obviously, that is not his entire platform, but you know, he was sort of continuing similarly to what his mentor had. And Big Jim Folsom had been elected on a similar platform in both 1946 and 1954. But Wallace's opponent in the Democratic primary was Attorney General John Patterson. Patterson was running on a pro-segregation platform, supported by the Ku Klux Klan. Wallace, on the other hand, had the support of the National Association for the Advancement

• 9:54Tracy V. Wilson?

  of Colored People, or NAACP. The primary went into a runoff with Patterson beating Wallace and then beating the Republican candidate William Longshore by a landslide.

• 10:07Holly Frey?

  When asked what had gone wrong, Wallace reportedly told supporters some version of the following quote, which uses a slur that we are not going to repeat. Quote, "I got out N-worded by John Patterson. This is the first and last time I will be out N-worded by another candidate." This quote and variations on it have been widely reported, but Wallace would later deny ever saying it.

• 10:34Tracy V. Wilson?

  Apart from shifting his politics on race completely, this loss for governor took a toll on Wallace's personal life. Lerline, fed up with his absences and rumors of infidelity and a deep depression that he went into following the loss, took the children to her parents' house and filed for divorce. George begged her to come back, and the two eventually reconciled. And their last child, Jamie Lee, named after Robert E. Lee, was born in 1961.

• 11:00Holly Frey?

  Wallace returned to his position in the circuit court, where he turned his attention to blocking federal efforts at civil rights. When the U.S. Civil Rights Commission requested that he turn over voting records, he refused to do it and was threatened with prison for contempt. He wound up turning the records over by handing them over to grand juries to turn in on his behalf, so he could say that he had not personally given the government those records, but he could also stay out of jail.

• 11:28Tracy V. Wilson?

  In 1962, Wallace ran for governor again. This time, he took a pro-segregation, pro-state's rights platform and, like John Patterson, got the support of the Ku Klux Klan. He won the Democratic primary after a runoff, and the Republican Party fielded no candidate at all in the election. Even though he was running unopposed, he got more than 300,000 votes, more than any candidate in Alabama history at that time. That infamous "Segregation Forever" inaugural address was co-written by Klansman Asa Carter, who could easily be his own podcast subject, as he also wrote "The Education of Little Tree" and "The Rebel Outlaw Josie Wales" under the pseudonym of Forrest Carter.

• 12:12Tracy V. Wilson?

  Wallace's first term saw some of the most notorious incidents of racist violence in the civil rights movement, with critics blaming Wallace's rhetoric for stoking the fire. And we are going to talk about it after a quick sponsor break.

• 12:28Speaker 02

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• 12:30Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 12:59Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 13:11Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 13:22Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 13:29Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 14:11Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 14:35Holly Frey?

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• 15:20Holly Frey?

  but to actually understand them. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. Start asking better questions and listen to Health vs. Hype on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 15:38Tracy V. Wilson?

  Guess who's back in the house? The old gays return for season two of Silver Linings, their hit podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Just wait until you hear what hosts Robert McMillan and Jesay have in store this time around. They strut back down memory lane, navigating life, love, loss, and everything that shaped them along the way. And as usual, someone just might break into song. From leather bars to bathhouses, dance floors to drag brunch, nothing stays off limits. These are the kinds of insights that can only come from experience. So, listen to your elders, honey, and discover the silver linings you can take with you. All sass, zero filter, and decades of perspective from four friends,

• 16:22Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 16:42Tracy V. Wilson?

  Although there were certainly incidents of racial violence before George Wallace took office in Alabama, and that violence was not confined just to Alabama, some of the most infamous incidents in the United States Civil Rights Movement happened there during his first term.

• 16:58Holly Frey?

  On May 2nd, 1963, children began marching from Birmingham 16th Street Baptist Church to City Hall as part of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's Children's Crusade. That first day, hundreds were arrested. When even more gathered to march on May 3rd, Birmingham Commissioner of Public Safety Bull Connor used high-pressure fire hoses, police dogs, and clubs to turn them back. This was televised, and although the march itself was controversial because it put children in danger, it propelled the movement into the national spotlight.

• 17:34Tracy V. Wilson?

  The 16th Street Baptist Church was bombed just before the start of Sunday school on September 15, 1963, killing Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Denise McNair, and Carol Robertson, ages 11 to 14. A week before the bombing, George Wallace had told the New York Times that there needed to be, quote, "a few first-class funerals." So civil rights activists accused him of creating the climate that led to the bombing. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wired him to say, quote, "The blood of four little children is on your hands. Your irresponsible and misguided actions have created in Birmingham and Alabama the atmosphere that has induced continued violence and now murder."

• 18:17Holly Frey?

  In 1963, two black students, Vivian Malone and James Hood, tried to enroll in the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, which was still segregated in spite of the fact that nine years had passed since the Supreme Court found school segregation unconstitutional in Brown versus Board of Education. It was also in spite of the attempt of one other black student, Athoreen Lucy, who attended classes for three days in 1956.

• 18:46Tracy V. Wilson?

  She was suspended, quote, "for her own safety" because white students were rioting over her admission, including throwing tomatoes and eggs at her. She sued the school, which then used that lawsuit as grounds to expel her permanently.

• 19:01Holly Frey?

  When Malone and Hood tried to enroll, U.S. District Judge Seaborn Lynn forbade Wallace from interfering. But Wallace defied that order. Flanked by state troopers, he personally blocked the door to Foster Auditorium where they were to register for class until the National Guard arrived later in the day to intervene. This became known as the "stand in the schoolhouse door," and it was one of the things that prompted President John F. Kennedy to push for civil rights legislation.

• 19:33Tracy V. Wilson?

  Selma, Alabama was also the scene of ongoing nonviolent civil rights protests during this time, which were repeatedly met with arrests and violence on the part of law enforcement. Many of these related to voting rights. At the time, discriminatory literacy tests, poll taxes, poll taxes and a flat-out refusal to register black people to vote meant that many black people could not.

• 19:55Holly Frey?

  These protests included a series of marches to the Selma courthouse to try to register people to vote. And eventually to the Selma to Montgomery March, which was a symbolic march to the state's Capitol following activist Jimmy Lee Jackson being shot and killed by a state trooper during a march. Jackson was one of several civil rights activists killed in Alabama during Wallace's administration.

• 20:19Tracy V. Wilson?

  Wallace had insisted that this march would not take place, saying, quote, "Such action will not be allowed on the part of any other group of citizens or non-citizens of the state of Alabama and will not be allowed in this instance. The government must proceed in an orderly manner and lawful and law-abiding citizens must transact their business with the government in such a manner. There will be no march between Selma, Alabama, and Montgomery, and I have so instructed the Department of Public Safety."

• 20:45Holly Frey?

  On what came to be known as Bloody Sunday on March 7, 1965, several hundred marchers to Selma tried to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Under Wallace's orders to stop the march, state troopers and a posse assembled by Dallas County Sheriff Jim Clark attacked the marchers and brutally beat them.

• 21:05Tracy V. Wilson?

  Wallace would later say, quote, "It was something that happened that enraged me because I didn't intend for it to happen that way. But I didn't want them to get beyond that point where there was some people that told me there might be some violence." So in other words,

• 21:22Tracy V. Wilson?

  to prevent the marchers from getting to somewhere where people were waiting to hurt them, the police hurt them.

• 21:29Holly Frey?

  The Selma to Montgomery March would be turned away at the bridge a second time before U.S. District Judge Frank M. Johnson ordered that the marchers be allowed to exercise their constitutional rights. Wallace said that Alabama did not have the resources to protect them, and President Lyndon Johnson federalized the Alabama National Guard and sent military police and army troops to act as an escort.

• 21:54Tracy V. Wilson?

  These Selma to Montgomery marches raised national awareness of voting rights issues and contributed directly to President Lyndon Johnson's push for the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This act banned most of the strategies that had been used to keep black people from voting. However, in 2012, the Supreme Court struck down one of its provisions, which had required states that had previously used discriminatory election laws to get federal approval before changing their election laws. As a result, several states implemented election laws that the federal government had previously denied as discriminatory.

• 22:32Holly Frey?

  So, we're going to back up just a little bit because in 1964, Wallace had actually made his first run at the White House, getting his name on the ballot in three states. And he didn't pursue the race aggressively, in part because Republican candidate Barry Goldwater publicly denounced the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which was basically Wallace's whole platform. Propelled by Goldwater's ultimate loss in the race, Wallace decided to make a bigger effort in 1968. But there was a problem. He'd have far more support in doing so if he was still governor, but the Alabama Constitution did not allow governors to serve consecutive terms.

• 23:12Tracy V. Wilson?

  First, he tried to get the state legislature to amend the Constitution so that he could run again, but that failed. So instead of admitting defeat, he put his wife, Lerline, on the ballot with the intent of basically running things from behind the scenes. He would basically still have a lot of the perks that came along with being governor that he could use as a springboard to run for president again, with his wife actually being the one in office.

• 23:37Holly Frey?

  However, Lerline had cancer. During the cesarean delivery of their daughter, Janie Lee, in 1961, doctors had found a suspicious mass in her uterus. And as was common practice at the time, the doctors told George, but not Lerline, and they left it up to him whether she should be informed. And George kept this information from her, saying that he didn't want to upset her. So, four years later, in 1965, when she went to a gynecologist because she was having unusual bleeding, she was completely shocked to find that she had a malignant tumor.

• 24:17Tracy V. Wilson?

  In spite of her complete lack of interest in politics and the in spite of the fact that she had just undergone a hysterectomy and radiation treatments, which were described to the public as female surgery, Lauraleen agreed to run as her husband's stand-in. She ran on a campaign of upholding all of her husband's policies and his being her number one assistant. In the early days on the campaign trail, she would start off by giving a brief prepared remarks before introducing her husband, who would then basically take it over from there. As she gradually became more confident in her speaking skills, she did start to campaign on her own.

• 24:55Holly Frey?

  And in the end, she beat 10 male candidates, some of them former governors, in the primary. She then won the election by a landslide, becoming the first woman governor elected in the deep south.

• 25:08Tracy V. Wilson?

  When her term as governor began, she and George had offices across the hall from each other, and staff called them Governor Lauraleen and Governor George. She did push for some initiatives of her own, including legislation related to state parks and to mental health, that latter following a tour she made of two state institutions whose conditions really horrified her. During her time in office, the Alabama Legislature also ratified an amendment that would allow governors to serve consecutive terms.

• 25:36Holly Frey?

  And as promised, she also upheld her husband's promise to fight integration. In March of 1967, a federal court ordered that Alabama's schools must be desegregated in Lee versus Macon County Board of Education. This followed a lengthy series of maneuverings that George Wallace had overseen during his first term as governor to try to stop integration. This includes delaying the start of school, stationing troops at schools to prevent black students from entering, and transferring all of the white students out of Tuskegee High School after black students were enrolled there.

• 26:13Tracy V. Wilson?

  Following the court order that came down during Lauraleen Wallace's time in office, she delivered an address that stridently denounced this ruling as infringing on the state's rights, vowing to use state troopers to prevent integration if necessary. This case then went on to the Supreme Court in Wallace versus the United States. Then the Supreme Court upheld the lower court's ruling, at which point some progress was actually made in desegregating the schools.

• 26:41Holly Frey?

  Lurleen Wallace was not able, however, to keep up her duties as governor for long. In July of 1967, doctors found another tumor in her abdomen, followed by numerous other tumors the following January.

• 26:55Tracy V. Wilson?

  She underwent tests and treatment at the MD Anderson Clinic in Houston, Texas, because there wasn't a cancer center in Alabama. Because she was governor, she had to travel back to Alabama during her treatment at least once every 20 days. During a lot of those times, she was in severe pain, and she underwent multiple operations. This went on until May of 1968, when she returned home to her family to die.

• 27:19Holly Frey?

  And she died on May 7, 1968, at the age of 41, after just 16 months in office.

• 27:26Tracy V. Wilson?

  Her body lay in state in an open casket, something that her husband ordered in defiance of her wishes, at the Capitol Rotunda. This was the first time anyone had lain in state there since the 1889 death of Jefferson Davis, who had been president of the Confederate States of America. Her death was met with a huge outpouring of public grief, with public schools, state offices, and some businesses closing the day of the funeral, and more than 25,000 people going to the Capitol to pay their respects.

• 27:56Holly Frey?

  And we're gonna next get into Wallace's later career, but first, we're gonna pause for a moment and have a word from one of our sponsors.

• 28:09Holly Frey?

  We've all done it, tumble down an internet rabbit hole trying to self-diagnose. And sometimes doing our own research can leave us more anxious than informed. Your feed is packed with wellness trends telling you to cold plunge, protein max, detox, track your sleep. But what's actually real? What's exaggerated? What's just wrong? That's exactly what Health vs. Hype from the American Medical Association and iHeart Media's Ruby Studio is here to find out. Each episode, Emmy-nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez, who's racked up billions of views across PBS, Discovery Channel, and YouTube, talks to doctors, influencers, and real people trying these trends.

• 28:51Holly Frey?

  Not to cancel them, not to hype them more, but to actually understand them. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. Start asking better questions and listen to Health vs. Hype on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 29:12Tracy V. Wilson?

  Guess who's back in the house? The old gays return for season two of Silver Linings, their hit podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Just wait until you hear what hosts Robert McMillan and Jesay have in store this time around. They strut back down memory lane navigating life, love, loss, and everything that shaped them along the way. And as usual, someone just might break into song. From leather bars to bathhouses, dance floors to drag brunch, nothing stays off limits. These are the kinds of insights that can only come from experience. So listen to your elders, honey, and discover the silver linings you can take with you. All sass, zero filter, and decades of perspective from four friends,

• 29:56Tracy V. Wilson?

  proving that queer joy only gets better with age on the podcast that never gets old. Listen to Silver Linings, available on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 30:12Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 31:24Speaker 04

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• 31:58Tracy V. Wilson?

  After Lurleen Wallace's death in 1968, she was succeeded by the lieutenant governor, Albert Brewer. He raised funds for a cancer center at the University of Alabama in her memory. And that same year, as he had been planning to do, George Wallace ran for president again under the American Independent Party.

• 32:17Holly Frey?

  Wallace got onto the ballot in every state, and he won five of them, earning more than 10% of the popular vote. Although he dropped some of his most explicit racist language, his campaign decried the influence of things like liberals, communists, and the interference of the federal government, leaning on more coded language to reach out to white voters who were unhappy with the progress of integration and increasing civil rights for black people.

• 32:44Tracy V. Wilson?

  He ran for governor again in 1970, using much of the same anti-integration platform that had won him the election in 1962. And at times, the 1970 campaign was even more explicit. But once he was actually in office, he softened his rhetoric. Following the passage of the Voting Rights Act and the long work of the civil rights movement, many of Alabama's black population, who made up more than a quarter of the state's population, were now registered to vote, Wallace realized that he would undermine his efforts if he continued to explicitly attack such a large group of the state's voters.

• 33:19Holly Frey?

  In 1972, Wallace once again ran for president, this time as a Democrat, and once again primarily reaching out to disaffected white voters, decrying forced busing to integrate schools and welfare loafing, and advocating, quote, "a return to law and order," and an end to foreign aid programs, especially to communist countries.

• 33:42Tracy V. Wilson?

  After winning the state of Florida, his campaign looked like it was set to be a lot more successful than he had been in 1968. But then, while he was campaigning in Laurel, Maryland, he was shot by Arthur Bremer while working the crowd at a rally. Bremer had previously planned to assassinate Richard Nixon, but had ultimately never opened fire.

• 34:03Holly Frey?

  While still recuperating, Wallace won the primaries in Maryland and Michigan as well. However, this injury left Wallace paralyzed from the waist down, and since he was hospitalized for months, he was unable to continue his campaign. He would go on to maintain that he would have won that presidency had he not been shot.

• 34:24Tracy V. Wilson?

  Although his injury put him out of the presidential race, he ran for Alabama governor again in 1974, since that amendment to the state constitution that had come through during Lurleen Wallace's administration once again allowed him to do so. He won for his third term and his second consecutive term.

• 34:41Holly Frey?

  And he once again spent part of his term as governor, again, running for president in 1976. He won the states of Alabama, South Carolina, and Mississippi in the primary, ultimately losing the Democratic nomination to Jimmy Carter, who he endorsed after dropping out of the race.

• 34:59Tracy V. Wilson?

  And numerous biographers describe him as being a lot more interested in campaigning than in governing.

• 35:06Holly Frey?

  It sure sounds that way. He spends a lot of his time as governor on the presidential campaign trail.

• 35:10Tracy V. Wilson?

  That's a true story. So after his gunshot injury and in light of the changing racial politics of the United States, in his later life, George Wallace started reaching out to the black community and trying to make amends. Historians and biographers really disagree on whether this attempt was motivated by a genuine change in views, or whether it was political savvy and a desire not to be remembered on the wrong side of history.

• 35:32Holly Frey?

  He began to insist that his hard-line segregationist stance was based on the Constitution and a misreading of the Bible, not on white supremacy. This does not, however, quite sync with some of the quotes that are attributed to him, such as, quote, "The colored are fine in their place, but they're just like children, and it's not something that's going to change. It's written in stone."

• 35:58Tracy V. Wilson?

  He also met with several of the still-living civil rights leaders who he had actively worked against, including the Reverend Ralph D. Abernathy, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, and Representative John Lewis. Lewis had been seriously beaten on Bloody Sunday during the first Selma-to-McGomery march. While presenting her with the Lurleen B. Wallace Award for Courage, he also praised Vivian Malone for her, quote, "strength, grace, and above all, courage," during the stand in the schoolhouse door.

• 36:28Holly Frey?

  In the words of Selma attorney J.L. Chestnut, quoted in the PBS American Experience production "George Wallace Setting the Woods on Fire," which came out in 2000, quote, "I have no problem forgiving George Wallace. I will not forget George Wallace, because we must deal with the reality of Wallace. How is it that a demagogue insulting 20 million black people daily on the television can rise to the heights that Wallace did? Forgive? Yes. Forget? Never."

• 36:58Tracy V. Wilson?

  George Wallace was elected to his last term as governor in 1982 in a campaign that actively sought and received votes from the black community. His win made him the only person in Alabama history to serve for four terms. When he took office in 1983, he made it a point to appoint black officials to government positions. He also became a born-again Christian that year.

• 37:20Holly Frey?

  He retired from that last term in January of 1987, and he died on September 13th of 1998 in Montgomery, Alabama.

• 37:29Tracy V. Wilson?

  Regardless of whether Wallace's shifts in racial ideology were genuine or just politically expedient, his methods of campaigning and his shifting platforms have really had a long-lasting influence on American politics. Dan T. Carter, in a paper published in the Journal of Southern History in 1996, writes, "Wallace, more than any other political figure of the 1960s and early 1970s, sensed the frustrations, the rage of many American voters, made common place a new level of political insubility and intemperate rhetoric, and focused that anger upon a convenient set of scapegoats." That was in 1996. So that is George Wallace.

• 38:13Tracy V. Wilson?

  Someone asked us on, yeah, somebody asked us on Twitter one time if we would do a podcast on Bull Connor, who was the person who turned the fire hoses on the Children's Crusade during their march. Uh, I'm just gonna say, after having done this one, I'm not, that, that's gonna be way down the list because it's hard. Yeah.

• 38:40Tracy V. Wilson?

  Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. If you'd like to send us a note, our email address is [email protected]. And you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

• 39:02Holly Frey?

  A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenx, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 39:33Tracy V. Wilson?

  Whether you're calling the wise women in your life, video calling your girlfriends across the country, or checking in on someone who always knows how to make you smile, staying connected matters. Those small conversations, shared laughs and quick hellos are what keep relationships strong even when life gets busy. Some of the most life-giving conversations start with just a phone call. That's why AT&T guarantees the network you can rely on so you can focus on the moments and people that matter most. That's the AT&T Guarantee. AT&T: Connecting changes everything. Terms and conditions apply. Visit att.com/guarantee for details.

• 40:10Speaker 04

  Livright, publishers of John U. Bacon's New York Times bestseller, The Gales of November, a chronicle of the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald's 1975 shipwreck. Never has it been told better than by Mr. Bacon in this colorful book, writes John J. Miller of The Wall Street Journal, while author Hampton Sides proclaims that it's destined to be a classic. The Gales of November, now in paperback.

• 40:38Tracy V. Wilson?

  Long hours, work deadlines, family commitments. You give so much to everyone else. Isn't it time to invest in yourself? The University of Arizona Global Campus is built for working adults with flexible online degree programs designed to fit your life. Your previous education, training and eligible experience may even help you earn college credit. At UAGC, you can take one accelerated course at a time, helping you move toward your goals in five- and six-week class formats. Visit uagc.edu today. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.