What George Wallace Can Teach Us in the Era of #BlackLivesMatter

Of all the supporters of segregation in history, there are few so loud and perhaps none so memorable as 4-time Alabama Governor George Wallace. Best known for declaring “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever,” he also declared the Civil Rights Act to be “a fraud, a sham, and a hoax.”

In his 1968 presidential campaign, he became the last non-major-party candidate to win any pledged electoral votes. Running as an American Independent, he earned 46 electoral votes in the Deep South: Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and North Carolina. Despite running on a platform that explicitly derided Civil Rights legislation and intended to halt desegregation in its tracks, Wallace was known for staunchly rejecting any accusation of racism. His speeches are filled with platitudes about seeing all people as God’s children, and not discriminating on race, color, or creed. In an interview with Face the Nation in 1968, Wallace made a claim that should sound eerily familiar to modern Americans:

“I don’t regard myself as a racist, and I think the biggest racists in the world are those that call other folks racist…I think the biggest bigots in the world are those who call other folks bigots.”

It’s fairly easy for us to look back on such a claim made by a man who proudly drew a line in the sand to oppose desegregation and consider it ridiculous, even moreso when we realize that his claim was made barely 3 months after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., a man he had previously accused of leading a band of “pro-communist” agitators. Even with Wallace’s public repentance in his later years, his storied career in the maintenance of racist systems can give us insight into how opponents of racial equality can mask their opposition in patriotic rhetoric.

In his 1963 inaugural address, he does not once suggest the superiority of any white race, nor the inferiority of a black one. Quite the contrary: his rhetoric towards the races is arguably conciliatory at points, claiming to “respect the separateness of others,” and in “invit[ing] the negro citizens of Alabama to work with [them]” in their endeavor to maintain a segregationist state.

Wallace’s July 4th address a little over a year later was an unhinged tirade against the SCOTUS rulings on the Civil Rights Act, in which he referred to them as “black-robed despots” and accused the Civil Rights Act of threatening freedom of speech, assembly, and association. Just as in his famous inaugural, this speech speaks not against members of any race, but against “liberal left-wingers” and a law that he claimed would “destroy individual freedom and liberty” in the United States.

This trend is evident throughout Wallace’s public remarks; while he has many quotes on race that are abhorrent in a modern perspective, most of his rhetorical work in maintaining racist systems was very carefully crafted as criticism of the political left, international Communism, and of Big Government. Reading through most of his work, a solid 90% of his argumentation would not be offensive to most people by even modern standards…at least not until the conclusions of his claims are reached.

Governor Wallace gives us an important window into the ways that bad actors usurp patriotic rhetoric to advance bigoted goals…and in how they try to shut down movements that agitate for the fulfillment of American promises. As Wallace accused Civil Rights protestors of being servants of an anti-white agenda in the 60s, so now are BlackLivesMatter protestors accused of being anti-white. As Dr. King and other movement leaders were accused of using black issues as a smokescreen to advance communism because of their left-leaning connections, so now is BlackLivesMatter accused of being a Marxist front.

Is the BlackLivesMatter movement a Marxist facade behind which the downfall of the American way of life is being plotted? In judging the merits of that accusation, we should consider that it has been leveled against almost every liberation movement in U.S. history, including the feminist and LGBT movements.

This is obviously not to say that criticism of Big Government makes one a bad-faith actor. Obviously not, this country was founded in exactly that kind of criticism. That said, Wallace’s example reminds us that those who wish to prevent social change will co-opt patriotic rhetoric and small-government causes to do so. Examples of the ways good liberty-minded people are betrayed, conned, or co-opted by such racist voices include recent backlash against Jo Jorgenson, the discovery that Tucker Carlson’s lead writer is a vocal and virulent racist, and Ron Paul’s entire career.

When black lives are on the line, as they have been so many times in American history, we should remember to check and double-check any criticism of activists that advances a narrative of protest as un-American or anti-white…much of it has its roots in the same racial ignorance that inspired Wallace 60 years ago. Above all, Wallace’s words should inspire hope within the young people of this country who are determined to agitate for a better world; they deserve to know how ineffective their critics’ words will be in the eyes of history.