George Wallace: Inaugural Address as Governor

Context

In losing the Civil War, the South was forced to free all African American slaves. However, the South did not decide to treat the former slaves on an equal basis with whites. The North created Reconstruction and the Reconstruction Amendments, including the Fourteenth Amendment (1868), which broadened the definition of citizenship and required equal treatment of all citizens, and the Fifteenth Amendment (1870), which guaranteed male citizens the right to vote regardless of race. The Democratic Party, however, won back political power in the mid-1870s and vowed to reverse the moves toward equality that had occurred under Reconstruction.

Segregation was imposed, generally starting in the early 1890s, in all areas of life, ranging from separate street cars to separate Bibles to swear on in court. While the facilities provided to African Americans were not equal, the dubious “separate but equal” formula was approved by the Supreme Court in the infamous Plessy v. Ferguson case in 1896. Constitutions adopted throughout the South made segregation legal. These documents also generally disenfranchised African Americans through some combination of poll taxes, grandfather clauses (which created restrictions on voting except for those whose ancestors had the right to vote at the time of or shortly after the Civil War), and literacy tests.

African Americans protested at the time but accomplished little. Throughout the early twentieth century, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People fought discrimination in the courts, and this effort accelerated after World War II, resulting in the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which declared segregation in education unconstitutional. The administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, however, preferred to ignore or delay implementation of that ruling. In the early 1960s, the administration of President John F. Kennedy started haltingly to enforce desegregation in higher education. For residents of Alabama, this was most notable through actions taken nearby, at the University of Mississippi, in 1962. Federal troops were called in to escort James Meredith, the first African American student to attend that university, throughout the year, after unarmed federal marshals had come under attack when they earlier had tried to calmly and unobtrusively shepherd Meredith through the campus. A riot had ensued, resulting in two deaths and hundreds of injuries, including soldiers and federal marshals wounded by gunfire. Northerners viewed this national tragedy as the result of the South’s refusal to follow the law, while many southerners intrepreted the federal presence as an imposition of northern values reminiscent of the Reconstruction era.

Thus, at the time of Wallace’s speech, many were wondering how long it would take for the Kennedy administration to finally act and enforce all of the civil rights laws and court rulings across the South. But those who favored civil rights were not the target of Wallace’s address; rather, his speech was aimed at winning the loyalty of those citizens who opposed civil rights. The divisiveness of the speech was heightened by the city in which he gave it: Montgomery, the state’s capital. It was there that the modern civil rights movement was started with Rosa Parks’ defiant stand that resulted in the Montgomery bus boycott, and it was there that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., first came to national attention. Alabama remained one of the two most segregated states of the South, so it was an important battleground.

Wallace’s own political history played into the content of his speech. He was first elected as a legislator after World War II and had his eye on higher office much of his life. He positioned himself to be a candidate for governor in 1958 but lost in the Democratic primary to John Patterson. Patterson was a more hard-core segregationist than Wallace, and Wallace vowed never to get outmaneuvered on the segregation issue again. He believed that hard-core segregation was the way to win political favor in the 1960s, and, aiming for national political prominence, that was what he endorsed in his inaugural address.