All This Marvelous Potential: Robert Kennedy's 1968 Tour of Appalachia by Matthew Algeo

Author:Matthew Algeo [Algeo, Matthew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non-Fiction, History
ISBN: 9781641600620
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 2020-03-03T10:11:42+00:00

25

Lurleen

THERE WERE SO MANY TRAGEDIES in the spring of 1968 that the agonizing demise of Lurleen Wallace, the incumbent governor of Alabama, barely registered beyond the state’s borders at the time and is all but forgotten today. But her death was no less a tragedy than King’s and Kennedy’s, if only because it was the result not of an assassin’s bullet but of a husband’s unimaginable cruelty and neglect.

Robert Kennedy was far from the perfect husband. His friend and aide Richard Goodwin said there was no doubt that Kennedy had extramarital affairs. “Of course he did,” Goodwin told Kennedy biographer Larry Tye. “That’s a Kennedy family tradition.” But Kennedy’s infidelity pales when compared to Wallace’s mistreatment of his wife, whose premature death was at least partly his fault.

Lurleen Burns was born in Tuscaloosa County on September 19, 1926. She graduated from high school at fifteen, too young to enroll in nursing school, as was her dream. To bide her time, she took a job at the Kresge’s five-and-dime in Tuscaloosa, which is where she met George Corley Wallace Jr., a recent graduate of the University of Alabama School of Law soon to be inducted into the Army Air Corps. They were married on May 22, 1943. She was sixteen. He was twenty-four.

In 1961 the couple’s fourth and final child, a girl named Janie Lee, was born by Cesarean section. Shortly after the birth, the doctor who performed the C-section informed George that he’d noticed some abnormal tissue during the procedure. He suspected Lurleen had uterine cancer, and he urged George to send her to an oncologist. As was not unusual at the time, the doctor never spoke with Lurleen about his concerns—only her husband.

George Wallace had already lost his first run for governor, in 1958. Back then he’d run as a moderate; he was even endorsed by the NAACP. His opponent in the Democratic runoff—the de facto election—was John Patterson, a hard-line segregationist endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan. After losing to Patterson by eleven points, Wallace swore that he would never be “out-niggered” again.

Wallace was planning on running for governor again in 1962, and Lurleen’s condition would, well, complicate his campaign—so he didn’t tell her she possibly had cancer.

The Alabama constitution prohibited governors from serving consecutive terms, so John Patterson was barred from running for reelection in ’62. Wallace—running as a staunch segregationist this time—won the Democratic runoff with 55 percent of the vote. The Republicans didn’t even bother to field a candidate in the general election, which Wallace won with 96 percent. In his inaugural address on January 14, 1963, he vowed to block federal attempts to integrate Alabama’s schools, famously declaring, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”

In early 1963, three African American students applied to the University of Alabama. Wallace promised to block their admission. Mindful of the rioting precipitated by the integration of the University of Mississippi the previous fall and desperate to prevent a repeat in Tuscaloosa, Robert Kennedy, the attorney general, flew to Montgomery—the “Cradle of the Confederacy”—on the evening of Wednesday, April 24, 1963.

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