(Note: these learning modules encompass the
actual class lectures, and are designed for those students who have to miss
class through no fault of their own, and also as a refresher for all students.
Bold print in the notes are what the professor writes on the board.)
Alabama is a
Deep South state historically marked by the vicious Old South racist
segregationist George Wallace, but Alabama also illustrates how some of these
white segregationists changed on the race issue after African Americans had the
right to vote protected by the 1965 Voting Rights Act. It is also fascinating
that the “changed” Wallace was able to assemble an ideologically diverse
bi-racial coalition so that Democrats dominated state politics, but as soon as
he left the political scene Republicans made gains and have become the dominant
party in today’s Alabama. As such, we focus heavily on George Wallace when
talking about Alabama, and it is likely that his life will make a great test
question. One can divide his career into three parts: support for economic
liberalism similar to FDR; his racist support for segregation; and his
construction of a biracial coalition focused around progressive economic issues
and racial moderation.
Wallace was able to appeal to the common man
since that was his own background. He was born in 1919 in a shotgun house
with a leaky roof, no electricity or running water, and an outhouse
(no indoor toilet). He arrived at the University of Alabama carrying a cardboard
suitcase with only two shirts and some underwear, and worked part-time
jobs and waited tables at his boarding house. Wallace’s future wife Lurleen
was a dime-store (convenience store today) clerk. He twice won the state’s bantamweight
boxing championship, and served in the Army Air Corps in the Pacific
theater during World War 2.
Wallace was elected to
the state legislature in 1946 by a real people-oriented direct campaign,
as he hitched rides or walked miles between small towns and stopped at farmhouses
and fields to talk to every voter. Campaigning at churches and school plays,
he would talk about his desire to help the farmers, the elderly, and the
schools. Wallace would greet workers at cotton mill factory gates
and show interest in the working man. An ally of populist and racial
liberal Governor Folsom, as a state legislator Wallace helped to create new trade
schools, provide free tuition to the widows and children of World War 2 veterans,
and even served on the board of all-black Tuskegee University.
Wallace’s focus on the common people was
also reflected years later in 1966 when he campaigned for his wife as governor,
as he mocked New York reporters for their elitism and disdain for a lady who
had been a dime-store clerk and whose father had been a shipyard worker.
Even during his first two terms as governor after running racist campaigns,
Wallace successfully backed such progressive programs as increasing the number
of junior colleges and trade schools, increased funding for highways,
and improved workmen compensation and unemployment benefits.
As the civil rights movement began to heat up,
Wallace changed into the blatant racist segregationist that he is most known
for today. Elected a circuit judge in 1952, Wallace was known as the Fighting
Little Judge for his feisty rhetoric and folksiness in opposing any federal
efforts to eliminate racial segregation. He lost the 1958 gubernatorial race to
an even more vicious segregationist (the attorney general who had shut down the
state’s NAACP chapter), so he pledged that he would never be out-segged
again (some say he used the N word).
Wallace was elected governor in 1962 as
the most segregationist of the candidates, as he blasted “race-mixing”
federal judges, and promised to “stand in the schoolhouse door” to
oppose federal desegregation court orders (Lesher book, 1994, George Wallace:
American Populist, pp. 155, 156, 160). In his inauguration address, he promised
to fight “federal tyranny” and proudly proclaimed, “Segregation now,
segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” In his first term as governor,
he did indeed stand in the University of Alabama schoolhouse door,
forcing President Kennedy to send in the National Guard to integrate the
university. Wallace also closed a high school that had been ordered to
desegregate, supported the creation of private schools to avoid
integration, and even withdrew state government funds from a bank run by
a racial liberal. During his first term there was considerable white
violence directed against civil rights workers, including the Birmingham
church bombing that killed four girls (including one of former Secretary of
State Condi Rice’s childhood friends), the beating of civil rights marchers in
Selma, and the police use of fire hoses and attack dogs in Birmingham, where
Martin Luther King was jailed. Ironically, national revulsion against seeing
these scenes on television further motivated President Kennedy and the Congress
to pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Limited to
one term at the time, Wallace got his wife elected governor in 1966, but she
died of cancer after only two years.
Wallace returned to the governorship in 1970,
as he beat the racially moderate lieutenant governor-turned-governor Albert
Brewer, who sought black support and backed rewriting the state’s 1901
constitution that disenfranchised most African Americans. Wallace played the race
card to win the Democratic primary, as he campaigned against the “Bloc
Vote (Negroes and Their White Friends)” and the “Spotted Alliance”
(Bass and DeVries, 1977, The Transformation of Southern Politics, 1977, p. 65).
Wallace began to change on the race issue in 1971, as he began as
governor to greet integrated school groups and to sign photographs for
them. His inaugural address stressed a more unifying economic message,
as he pledged governmental action to help the poor, the weak, and the humble,
and asserted that Alabama belonged to everyone regardless of race, age,
and economic status. In his 1972 bid for the Democratic presidential
nomination, he was shot, nearly died, and seemed to be humbled when he learned
that black ministers were praying for him. Now confined to a wheelchair
for the rest of his life, in 1973 he crowned the first African American
homecoming queen at the University of Alabama, and attended a conference
of black mayors and proclaimed that all races were God’s children, and
therefore everyone was equal. In 1974 Wallace visited Martin Luther King’s
church in Montgomery and pleaded that he had been misunderstood and had
opposed federal desegregation for states’ rights reasons rather than because of
racism. Wallace won over 25% of the African American vote in the 1974
Democratic primary, won the state’s AFL-CIO endorsement, and crushed his
Republican challenger to win a third term as governor.
In the late 1970s Wallace became a born again
Christian and admitted that he had been wrong to support racial segregation.
Wallace won a final, fourth term as governor in 1982 by stressing economic
issues in this recession year. He expressed concern for the unemployed
and hungry, and pledged to protect the working class. He blasted the
special interests, opposed tax loopholes for the rich, and mocked
Republicans who only had to worry about who would mow their beachfront lawns
(Alexander Lamis book, 1990, The Two-Party South, expanded edition, p. 90). As
Republicans were becoming more of a threat in state elections, winning 40% of
the vote in the general election, the biracial governing Democratic coalition
was quite strong. Even though Wallace had won only one-third of the black vote
in the Democratic primary, he earned 90% of African American votes when facing
a conservative Republican in the general election. In his fourth term, Wallace
finally appointed African Americans to state governmental positions.
Despite Wallace’s “change” on the race issue, it is hard to
undo what he did and the harm that he caused many Americans. It seems like
poetic justice that after leaving office he would often be found alone in a
Capital restaurant, being in constant pain from respiratory problems; he died
in 1998.
With Wallace’s departure from the scene, Alabama Democrats
still held both of the state’s U.S. senate seats with moderate conservatives
Howell Heflin and Richard Shelby. They lost the governorship in 1986 for the
first time since Reconstruction to businessman and preacher Guy Hunt, after the
state Democratic executive committee unseated their popular vote primary
victor in favor of a more liberal candidate, deciding that the most conservative
candidate had violated party rules by urging Republican first primary voters to
cross-over and vote in the Democratic runoff. Republican Hunt won
reelection, but resigned before his term was up after being convicted for
misusing his inauguration funds for personal expenses. National Democrats made
their own unforced error by their intolerance towards two-term Senator
Shelby’s opposition to the Clinton economic program, prompting him to
switch to the Republican Party in 1994 and to blast the party as no longer
having any room for a conservative Southern Democrat such as himself.
Shelby went on to win re-election as a Republican four times, with state
Democrats resigned to running such weak candidates as one who only raised
$5,000 and a retiree who had to mortgage his pickup truck just to pay the
modest qualifying fee. Democrats also lost Heflin’s seat when he retired and
was replaced by Republican state attorney general Jeff Sessions, who
favored welfare reform, school prayer, and a smaller government, and who
blasted his Democratic opponent as a liberal allied with Bill Clinton and
(liberal Massachusetts Senator) Ted Kennedy and beholden to trial lawyers.
Sessions resigned for a stormy term as Trump’s first Attorney General, and the
Republican governor appointed the state GOP attorney general as Interim
Senator. That interim senator was knocked off in a special primary election by
controversial conservative state supreme court judge Roy Moore, whose claim to
fame was having been twice removed from the court for violating federal court
orders prohibiting his 10 commandments monument in his courtroom and his
refusal to permit same sex marriages. In the December 2017 special general
election, Moore faced Democrat former U.S. Attorney Doug Jones, a
liberal pro-choice candidate famous for successfully prosecuting two Klansmen
responsible for the 1963 Birmingham church bombing that killed four kids.
Suddenly, numerous stories circulated about Moore’s behavior when he was in his
20’s, alleging that he had hit on teenager girls at the mall, pinched one’s
behind, and had appeared in his underwear before two teens. After Republican
Senator Shelby announced that he had voted for a different Republican as a
write-in, and after First Daughter Ivanka Trump said that there was a special
place in hell for guys like Moore, Democrat Jones won narrowly. So, it’s nice
to know that the Democratic chances in today’s Alabama are not totally
hopeless, as long as the other party nominates an alleged (or attempted) child!
Unfortunately for Jones, he compiled a pretty liberal voting record which
included voting to remove Trump from office (Trump got 64% of the vote in
Alabama). Republicans had a heated primary battle between Jeff Sessions who
wanted his old seat back (but Trump kept dumping on him) and Auburn football
coach Tommy Tuberville (who won this 2020 race). Embattled Jones was quickly
passed over by the national Democratic Party for campaign finance support, and
even though Republican Tuberville couldn't name the three branches of
governor (Uh, President, House, Senate...), he won in a landslide as Republican
voters outnumbered Democrats 2-1. Republicans also retained the state's other
Senate seat in 2022 after Shelby's retirement, as Shelby's Chief of Staff, Katie
Britt, touted the inclusive message of the GOP being the party of
"young conservatives... young women... and working Americans"
(Gillespie and Morris 2022, Fox News website article, June 22).
Republicans have consistently held the governorship for the
last 24 years with three governors elected to two terms, all of whom stressed
their successes in economic development and bringing more jobs to
Alabama. The first, Bob Riley, was also interesting as he used Christian
reasoning to cut taxes for lower income people, winning the prestigious
Governing magazine’s Profile in Courage award (which our own governor Haley
Barbour had also won for his leadership after Katrina) and suffering condemnation
from the conservative Cato Institute. Riley breezed to re-election based on the
100,000 new jobs he created, and his endorsement by all 18 of the state’s daily
newspapers. His successor Robert Bentley also played the economic
development card, winning re-election by touting 60,000 new jobs and a new
Airbus assembly plant in Mobile. He also fulfilled the unique pledge of not
accepting a paycheck until the state reached full employment (Trump has also
refused any pay as President.). Bentley resigned in 2017 after accepting a plea
bargain regarding a sex and campaign scandal. Two term Republican lieutenant
governor, Kay Ivey (great resume, including two terms as state
treasurer), became only the second woman governor of Alabama. She won
re-election in her own right (Lurleen Wallace had been a spouse of a governor)
in 2018, with voters liking her folksy drawl and no-nonsense demeanor (plus her
stress on jobs). Ivey won reelection in 2022 with 70% of the vote, as her
website touted Alabama's successful economic development, new capital
investment, and good-paying jobs.