Race Man by Michael G. Long

Author:Michael G. Long
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: City Lights Publishers

King: Again a Victim

In this 1979 column for the Los Angeles Times, Bond expresses scorn for Alabama governor George Wallace and his attempt to transform himself from a racist southerner into a conservative Republican worthy of higher office. Referring to Wallace as “the little banty rooster from Barbour County,” Bond draws special attention to federal judge Frank Johnson, whose rulings consistently and successfully opposed the governor’s efforts to maintain segregation. Bond also makes a connection between Wallace and King, seeing the racism fueled by Wallace as a cause of the economic nightmare that King’s dream had become.

Monday, Jan. 15, marks the 50th anniversary of the birth of Martin Luther King, Jr.; it will also be the day on which George Corley Wallace, who will be 60 years old in August, will leave Alabama’s governor’s office for the third—and last—time. Though the two men were born ten years apart, their lives were as entwined as two brothers’. And both the soon-to-be ex-governor and the murdered civil rights leader are victims of history revised.

Wallace will leave the governor’s Alabama mansion trailing blood— his own and the blood of innocents slain with his passive compliance. Since he survived Arthur Bremer’s bullets, the little banty rooster from Barbour County has rewritten his entire life story. The man who most trumpeted “segregation forever” now would have us believe that the motive force for his entire public life was not racism but the traditional Southern support for states’ rights.

If his crippled condition commands our pity, his life before Bremer must summon our scorn. For George Wallace raised the banner of Southern resistance to civil rights for blacks as high as it could go. As a circuit judge, governor, and two-time candidate for the presidency, Wallace embodied the South’s sick-headed, gum-snapping good old boys. He was the hero of frightened souls and rustic rurals. As pressures for integrated schools and neighborhoods pushed northward, he found an eager audience for his attacks on carpet-bagging Washington scalawags. Wallace insisted, then, that he did it for them, the dime-store clerks and gas-station attendants and small businessmen and farmers who were his Alabama and national base.

George Wallace appealed to their Southernness—that sense of place that preoccupied those who never left and the sense of loss so strong among those who did.

(Years later, Jimmy Carter would parlay the region’s natal shame into the White House; appealing to black and white Southerners scattered across America, Carter reminded them he wasn’t Wallace, and would never let them think that he was.)

The “little judge,” the nickname Wallace had won when he publicly battled with and privately surrendered to Federal Judge Frank M. Johnson, remained a battler until Arthur Bremer brought him low. He had the little man’s cockiness, the boxer’s rolling stance, his pudgy fist ever ready to pummel race-mixers. He did it verbally; his followers used guns and clubs.

There is a “New History” being taught in America’s colleges today. Written by critics of the ’60s and those who sat out the decade in graduate school, it remakes the era in the image of its interpreters.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.