Day 3 of our trip began in Selma, at Brown Chapel, which was the staging area and, later, the hospital for the marchers 44 years ago on the day that came to be known as “Bloody Sunday.”
The two-hour service was astonishing: a vivid portrait of the social and legal revolution that transpired in the second half of the 20th century.
The official speaker for the occasion was Eric Holder, the nation’s first African-American attorney general, who had been in office for less than a month. And the person who introduced him was the daughter of former Gov. George Wallace, who died in 1998 ”” the man who famously told the citizens of Alabama: “Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” ”” the same George Wallace who in 1963 stood in the door at the University of Alabama seeking to block two black students from enrolling. One of those students was Vivian Malone, Holder’s late sister-in-law.
Now these many decades later, Wallace’s daughter Peggy Wallace Kennedy spoke of the civil rights marchers in Selma as a brave band of believers who carried the flag of freedom. In the darkest moments, she said, they never gave up on the inherent goodness of mankind.
Wallace wasn’t so much a segregationist as a standard-issue political opportunist. As soon as the electorate turned against segregation, he went right along with them. He was Governor of Alabama when I lived there in the early ’80s, and got the majority of the black vote to boot.
Agreed Jeffersonian, but he was also reform-minded populist in his early career, taking up the mantle of segregation only after he adopted a very moderate stance on race in a primary and was beaten by his opponent as a result. More complex than many accounts credit (an exception being Marshall Frady’s early biography).
I’m not sure which I find more offensive; a racist or someone who feigns racism for political gain. In any case, Gov. Wallace stands as a parable for what repentance looks like.