Famous 1963 Inaugural Speech (Click to link)

Famous 1963 Stand in the School House Door Speech (Click to link)

July 4, 1964 Speech Against “Civil Rights”  (Click to link)

George Wallace was elected Governor of Alabama in 1962, 1970, 1974, and 1982.  He was also a Presidential candidate in 1964, 1968, 1972, and 1976.  In 1966, when he could not serve a second consecutive term as Governor, he ran his wife Lurleen for the office.  She was elected by a landslide.  However, she died in office on May 7, 1968.  She was only 41 years old.

George Wallace was born on August 25, 1919, in Clio, Barbour County, Alabama.  He was a successful boxer in his high school days, winning Alabama’s Golden Gloves award.  While in grade school, he went on a school field trip to the state capital in Montgomery.  Standing where Jefferson Davis had taken his oath of office as President of the Confederate States of America, he vowed to become Governor.  He would later be a page for his state representative, Chauncey Sparks.  Sparks would go on to be elected Governor in 1942.

George attended college at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, where he earned a law degree.  While there, he was an unsuccessful candidate for student body president.  Toward the end of his time in Tuscaloosa, he began a relationship with a local store clerk named Lurleen Burns.  Despite the fact that they met when he was 22 years old and she was 16, they were married within a year.

After graduation, George entered the Army Air Corps during World War II.  He turned down officer candidate school, figuring there would be more service men voting than officers.

After the war in 1945, Gov. Sparks secured George a position as an assistant state Attorney General.  In 1946, he was elected to the Alabama House of Representatives.  A fierce advocate for the working man, he aligned himself with the populist Gov. Big Jim Folsom.  In 1953, George was elected judge of Alabama’s 3rd Judicial Circuit in southeast Alabama.

In 1958, George sought the Democratic nomination for Governor.  He was humiliated when Attorney General John Patterson beat him in a landslide.  Although a devout segregationist, George centered his campaign on better roads and schools.  Patterson, on the other hand, put race front and center where Alabamians wanted it.  George would not make that mistake twice.

He recruited Asa Carter, Alabama’s most articulate pro-white writer, to write his speeches.  Also, he enlisted the help of Seymour Trammell, a Barbour County district attorney who worked behind the scenes to craft the racial campaign of John Patterson in 1958.  The change in focus led to George to a record landslide in 1962.

In his inaugural address in January 1963 (see link above), he sounded a great white rallying cry when he proclaimed, “in the name of the greatest people that have ever trotted this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever.”  The new Governor welcomed confrontation with the ‘civil rights’ agitators and thugs that were already targetting this beautiful state.

‘Civil rights’ agitators and thugs stepped up their mischief in Birmingham, Selma, Montgomery, and elsewhere.  They met with little success against the strong-willed law enforcement leaders in this state like Jim Clark of Selma and Bull Connor of Birmingham.  However, when the NAACP did succeed in winning a court order to integrate the University of Alabama, Gov. Wallace turned it into a public relations victory for white Alabamians.

On June 11, 1963, Gov. Wallace made good on a campaign promise by standing in the school house door to make his case against the forced integration of the University of Alabama by federal court order.  There, he laid out his belief in states’ rights, the Constitutions of Alabama and the United States, and the right of people to choose their own associates and control their own destinies.  (See link above)  This made Gov. Wallace a national hero, and mail flowed in from all over the country praising his actions.

In 1964, Gov. Wallace challenged President Lyndon Johnson in the Democratic Presidential primaries in Wisconsin, Indiana, and Maryland.  (See link above to read his key speech for 1964)  In both Wisconsin & Indiana, Gov. Wallace won about a third of the vote.  In Maryland, however, he carried almost 44%.  This success in Maryland came as a result of his strong support in the Baltimore suburbs, and his domination of the racially tense Eastern Shore.  When he spoke in Cambridge, on the Eastern Shore, the blacks rioted.  He would have won Maryland had it not been for the sizable militant black block vote in the City of Baltimore.

In 1966, the citizens of Alabama urged their legislators to amend the state constitution so to allow Gov. Wallace to run for re-election.  However, they refused.  As a result, George’s wife Lurleen ran for the office and won in a landslide.  The couple became known as Gov. George & Gov. Lurleen.  Gov. Lurleen died in office on May 7, 1968.  Lt. Gov. Albert Brewer of Decatur assumed the office upon Gov. Lurleen’s death.

In 1968, Gov. George ran for President as an independent candidate.  He showed great success in building a national movement, gaining ballot access in all 50 states.  Running against the pro-black leftist Democrat Vice-President Hubert Humphrey and moderate Republican former Vice-President Richard Nixon, conservative populists found a strong advocate in Gov. George.  But Gov. George’s movement just couldn’t overcome the establishment, and Richard Nixon won the election.

Although not achieving his goal of dead-locking the election and forcing the two national parties to overturn ‘civil rights’ legislation to be given the White House, Gov. George did carry Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Louisiana, and Arkansas.  He also won 13% of the popular vote nationally, which amounts to about 10 million supporters.

After the defeat, he returned to his middle-class home in Montgomery.  In 1970, former Gov. George challenged incumbant Gov. Albert Brewer in the Democratic primary.  Unfortunately, former Gov. George lost the initial vote to Gov. Brewer.  But since Gov. Brewer didn’t secure a majority, the nation watched as the Wallace-Brewer showdown became one of the most intense campaigns of all time.

Recognizing the threat Gov. George’s reelection posed to his presidency, President Richard Nixon provided much of the funding for the Brewer campaign.  Gov. Brewer enjoyed the support of Alabama’s black population, and former Gov. George argued that the incumbant neglected the interests of our white population to appease what he called the ’militant black block vote.’  Gov. Brewer never resisted the illegal orders of a liberal federal judge, assisted every outside agitator that imposed themselves on our state, and in fact never turned down a single unrealistic demand of any black citizen.  Gov. George represented a return to balance, decency, integrity, and tradition in state government.  Alabamians had a clear choice.

In the end, Gov. George prevailed in the run-off.  In his victory speech, Gov. George mocked President Nixon by saying that if he had lost, he’d have to tell the press that he “wouldn’t have you to kick around anymore.”  This was a jab at Nixon’s 1962 concession speech when he lost the California Governor’s race; there, Nixon told the media that they “wouldn’t have Nixon to kick around anymore.”  Albert Brewer would never hold public office again, and to this day remains Alabama’s most radical white leftist.

Just before his inauguration in 1971, Gov. George remarried to Cornelia Ellis.  Cornelia was considerably younger, very attractive, and was the neice of former Gov. Big Jim Folsom.  She gave Gov. George a make-over, so he’d be more fashionable for his 1972 run for the White House.  And Cornelia also convinced Gov. George to run in the Democratic primary for President, a move that brought him closer than anyone could’ve imagined to being President.

By May 15, 1972, Gov. George was the front-runner for the Democratic Party’s Presidential nomination.  Sadly, it was that day that Arthur Bremer, a liberal on racial issues, shot Gov. George in Laurel, Maryland.  Although he survived, Gov. George lost the use of the lower half of his body and was unable to continue his campaign for President.  Although Gov. George didn’t die, any hopes that the national Democratic Party could be of any worth to white working people was dead.

In 1974, Gov. George sailed back into the Governor’s office without substantial opposition.  He and Cornelia felt this set him up to be an FDR candidate (referring to Franklin D. Roosevelt being President, but also being crippled) for the Democratic Presidential nomination for President in 1976.  It was not to be.  Georgia Gov. Jimmie Carter, a mock Southern Baptist missionary who embodied every problem within post-’civil rights’ Christianity, won the Democratic nomination and then the White House.

Once again, Gov. George returned to Montgomery in defeat.  This time, he knew any hopes at being President were over.  As if being crippled and having his national movement break apart wasn’t bad enough, he soon found that that Cornelia was having an affair with a state trooper.  This ended his marriage.

In 1978, Gov. George was Constitutionally banned from seeking reelection.  US Sen. John Sparkman was vacating his office that year, but Gov. George said he had no desire to live in Washington, DC. 

In 1982, Gov. George would return to politics and run for Governor, again.  Despite winning a hard fought election, his fourth term was uneventful.  His health deteriorated greatly in these four years, his physical condition denied us of his fiery oratory, and his passion was gone.  He did not seek reelection in 1986.

He spent his remaining years in Montgomery.  By the mid-1990’s, he was about blind and almost deaf.  As had been the case since the shooting, he daily experienced great pain from the remnants of his shooting.  He died in the Jackson Hospital in Montgomery on September 13, 1998.