The Stand in the Schoolhouse Door, Revisited

"Let us rise to the call of the Freedom-loving blood that is in us and send our answer to the tyranny that clanks its chains upon the South."
-Governor George C. Wallace, Inaugural Address, January 14, 1963


Few names in Southern political history evoke such powerful emotions as that of Alabama Governor and four-time Presidential candidate, George Corley Wallace, Jr. For decades Wallace's fiery speeches, confrontational style and popularity across his native South-and sectors of the North and Midwest-befuddled and infuriated both establishment politicians and intelligentsia from coast to coast.(A favorite video search of mine is to pull up Governor Wallace stumping the ever-pompous neocon godfather, William F. Buckley, on his show The Firing Line in 1968)

Wallace never achieved his goal of reaching the White House, though performing astonishingly well as an independent in 1968 and in the 1972 Democratic Primaries, when an assassin's bullet ended both his mobility and his Presidential aspirations.

So why does Wallace, dead for nearly 25 years now, still haunt the dark corners of the feeble minds of the the modern day political elites and intelligensia? When President Joe Biden invokes the Alabama Governor's name in order to denounce Republicans as racists(whatever that means nowadays), why does it have such power in the modern day left, many of whom were born after George Wallace left the Governor's Mansion for good in 1987?

There are many reasons why Wallace is still a boogeyman to the political left. But I believe on some level, the left still fears Wallace for a very basic reason. They believed then and now that they are the intellectual superiors of the rest of the nation, Dixie above all. They can never forget that when the campaign to portray every white man south of the Mason-Dixon line as a bestial, uneducated and out of touch relic began in earnest, they kept tripping over a little country judge from Barbour County, Alabama named Wallace.

Wallace grew up in the "Black Belt" of Alabama, near the little town of Clio(kly-oh) Unlike many of his later antagonists, Wallace likely had frequent contact, even played with black children in the little farming community. Later, in the Alabama Legislature he was the protege of notoriously liberal-and corrupt- Governor James E. "Big Jim" Folsom, Sr. In 1948, when the Southern "Dixiecrats" walked out of the Democratic National Convention, Delegate Wallace declined.

Do not misunderstand, his refusal to join the walkout cannot be interpreted as sympathy with desegregation, nor even loyalty to Folsom. This is easily proven by the fact that Wallace, in that same convention, nominated conservative segregationist Georgia Senator Richard B. Russell for Vice-President. Wallace simply believed it unwise for Southerners to abandon their ancestral home in the Democratic Party to the hands of the Marxist wing of the Party. Time would prove him right, as the failure of the State's Rights Party left Southerners with nothing left but to go to the ancestral enemy-the bland, unprincipled and equally corrupt Republican Party.

In 1952, Wallace was elected Circuit Judge of the Third Judicial Circuit in Alabama. Judge Wallace originally was considered something of a liberal-perhaps still with Folsom's residue on him. However, on May 17, 1954 the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education was issued, and Judge Wallace, a Southerner and State's Rights man at heart, could not fathom such an invasion of State powers by the central government.

Judge Wallace began to respond by ordering injunctions against removal of segregation signs in railroad stations, and denied that the Federal goverment had the authority to march into Barbour County demanding sensitive voting information. This won him the title locally of the "Fightin' Lil' Judge", in part a reference to Wallace's younger days as an Alabama Golden Gloves boxing champion. It also brought him to statewide attention, such that he made his first-and only unsuccessful run for Alabama Governor in 1958.

With Governor John Patterson term limited in 1962, Wallace once more threw his hat in the ring for the top spot in Alabama. However, things had changed in the four years since Wallace made his first bid for Governor. The decision in Brown v. Board of Education had been translated into Federal Court orders to desegregate schools. Moreover, these orders took the form of a United States military infestation of Dixie not seen since Reconstruction. On September 4, 1957, President Eisenhower snatched the Arkansas National Guard out of the hands of Governor Orval Faubus and sent the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock Central High to enforce desegregation- at the point of a gun to the backs of high school students in Arkansas.

The inauguration of President John F. Kennedy, a Democrat, in 1961 offered little chance for relief. For by now, as George Wallace had feared, the South no longer had the influence in the Democratic Party it held just twelve years earlier. For all the Southern support he received in 1960, the New Englander Kennedy was all too willing to follow in Eisenhower's footsteps.

The reaction of Southern Governors and their constitutents varied.

In Georgia, Governor Ernest Vandiver, whose 1958 Campaign had run with the slogan "No, not one"(school would be integrated in Georgia), meekly accepted desegregation and believed that no presence on his or the State of Georgia's part was necessary at the University of Georgia. Events proved him wrong as a riot nearly occurred between integration supporters and segregationists in January of 1961.

To the east, South Carolina, once the firebrand State of Dixie offered no better. Democratic Governor Ernest "Fritz" Hollings' meek statement could have been uttered by any neoconservative Southern Republican Governor today:
"As we meet, South Carolina is running out of courts...this General Assembly must make clear South Carolina's choice, a government of laws rather than a government of men. This should be done with dignity."

Harvey Gantt was ultimately admitted to Clemson University without incident, but the failure of Hollings and incoming Governor Russell to provide leadership ultimately created a nightmare for their sucessor, Governor Robert McNair who was forced to call out the South Carolina National Guard to deal with violent integrationists in Orangeburg.

The meek acceptance of the Governors of Georgia and South Carolina should have been lessons to other Governors in Dixie-ambivalence toward desegregation-especially after Federal humiliation of the citizens with threats of troops a la Reconstruction- left one with a very angry and confused constituency, seeking leadership but finding none.

In Mississippi there was no doubt where the Governor stood-and what the Feds were willing to do. After Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett responded to the court orders with an address on the importance of State's Rights, the Kennedy White House made threats of force against Ole Miss public knowledge, infuriating an already tense populace in the Magnolia State. Nick Bryant, The Black Man Who Was Crazy Enough to Apply at Ole Miss The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, Autumn 2006

On September 30, 1962, the quiet little college town of Oxford, Mississippi was suddenly overwhelmed by 538 Federal Agents, made of few Federal Marshals, but chiefly of prison guards and border patrol. Quickly they seized Baxter Hall at Ole Miss, then seized the Lyceum as command center. For the already agitated crowd of Governor Barnett's supporters, this sight was too much; to the natives of Oxford, it must have seemed like Sherman had returned to finish off the town. Before it was all over, tear gas had been deployed on the crowd at Ole Miss, with cannisters striking a teenage girl and rendering one of the few Mississippi State patrolmen brave enough to stay unconscious. This triggered a riot which has been referred to as "the greatest conflict between federal and State authority since the Civil War" William Doyle, An American Insurrection, 2001

It was into this atmosphere that George Wallace entered the 1962 Alabama Governor's race. While Wallace made the promises he had made throughout his career-better schools, roads and the opening of trade schools in the State-his promise to "Stand Up for Alabama" caught national attention, when he promised to "stand in every schoolhouse door in Alabama" to prevent desegregation. He would soon be put to the test, as the Kennedy administration had determined that Wallace's alma mater, the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, was its next target.

President Kennedy, perhaps having learned a little something from the Ole Miss disaster sent his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy to Montgomery to negotiate with Governor Wallace. The meeting was cordial, but it did contain allusions to "all the force of the Federal Government" being used to desegregate, and agreement that "another Mississippi" was undesirable. In a low point for the Administration, Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach(one of the architects of the Ole Miss debacle) tried to blackmail Governor Wallace by threatening to reveal that he was receiving a 10% mental health disability benefit due to meningitis and combat fatigue suffered during World War II-ironically fighting for the government now breathing down his neck. According to Newsday Civil Rights reporter Michael Dorman, Attorney General Robert Kennedy even considered arresting and imprisoning Wallace in the Federal Penitentiary in Atlanta-removing him as Alabama Governor- and perhaps hoping that the unusually large Black Muslim population in the prison might take care of the Wallace problem for them.

However, Wallace remained determined to fulfill his promise to "stand in the door way", and on June 11, 1963 did just that. Just prior to leaving for the University of Alabama, Governor Wallace received a telegram from Deputy Attorney General Katzenbach, urging him not to show up at the auditorium where the black students were to be registered as it would only lead to certain violence. The Governor calmly and confidently replied "My presence on campus guarantees peace". When he arrived at the campus that morning, George C. Wallace gave an address that is worthy of any Constitutional law class study. But often overlooked is a restatement of his telegram to Katzenbach:

"I stand before you here today in place of thousands of other Alabamians whose presence would have confronted you had I been derelict and neglected to fulfill the responsibilities of my office. It is the right of every citizen, however humble he may be, through his chosen officials of representative government to stand courageously against whatever he believes to be the exercise of power beyond the Constitutional rights conferred upon our Federal Government. It is this right which I assert for the people of Alabama by my presence here today."

The rest is well known history. Just as Eisenhower snatched the Arkansas National Guard away from Faubus, Kennedy snatched a very unhappy Alabama National Guard away from Wallace and used it against him to integrate the University. But integration at Alabama's flagship University took place with a notable exception: an absence of violence, disorder, confusion and embitterment. No one was hurt. Moreover, none of Wallace's supporters went away feeling as though they had been played, that their Governor had been AWOL or hidden during the final crisis. Alabama's Governor had talked the talk, and he had walked the walk. The Heart of Dixie took notice; so did her sister Southern States. By the late 1960s Wallace was a favorite son candidate for the Presidency of the United States.

George Wallace, by standing in the doorway of the University of Alabama, had made the best of a terrible situation and allowed a change he detested to come to his beloved Alabama peacefully-but maintaining as far as he could the dignity of his State in the face of the Federal Government itself. In the process he became a regional hero on his way to a national sensation who made the establishment shake in their boots and-at least pretend-to moderate their views.

It is for this reason that the late Governor is so reviled and by the political left today. For a brief period, at least until his paralysis from the assassination attempt, it looked like a country boy from Southeast Alabama had outsmarted them, and made the connections with the people they only bragged about. For one other reason the great man from Barbour County is so reviled and denounced-the fear on their part that Dixie might once again be capable of producing such a man. We can only hope.

Postscript: unbeknownst to the author, this blog was begun on June 11, 2023-the 60th anniversary of the "Stand in the Schoolhouse Door"

Federal Troops hold Automatic Rifles to the backs of High School children. Little Rock, Arkansas, 1957. Diversity-so wonderful it had to be enforced at gunpoint.