Can an encounter with death change politicians? That was the case with the notorious segregator George Wallace from Alabama.

Donald Trump’s narrow escape from an assassin’s bullet led me – a Historian who has written about political polarization and the civil rights movement – ​​to consider one other norm-breaking populist who died through the election campaign: the previous governor of Alabama and US presidential candidate George Wallace.

By 1972, Wallace was remembered by most Americans because the face of the white South's violent response to the civil rights movement. Wallace had skillfully used divisive, racist attacks against liberals, government and protesters to turn into a serious contender for the presidency.

Wallace caused a stir when he publicly apologized for his segregationist past and asked for forgiveness after an assassination attempt in 1972 at a campaign rally in Maryland left him paralyzed.

Facing death and looking for redemption

It is unimaginable to look into Wallace's heart and understand what moved him. However, three aspects probably played a serious role.

First, the encounter with death. It turned Wallace's life the wrong way up and compelled him to desert his 1972 presidential bid. It also left behind a fierce man who had been a boxer in his youth and was pleased with his physical prowess, and who was now confined to a wheelchair. He underwent frequent operations and lived with constant pain.

It is common for many who have faced death to take into consideration their mortality and their livesWallace was no exception.

Religion may additionally have played a task. Although he was a down-to-earth, profane man who didn’t resist the temptations of the fleshWallace couldn’t escape the religious beliefs he had absorbed as a baby and which permeated the culture of the South. Faced along with his own mortality, he pondered the fate of his soul and sought redemption through Accept Jesus, repent and apologize.

Less than a month after Wallace was shot Civil rights icon Shirley Chisholm visited him in his hospital room in Maryland.

“I don’t want what happened to you to happen to anyone else,” she told the governor.

Wallace's daughter Peggy remembered that Chisholm's words moved her father to tears and he “started to change.”

In 1974, Wallace was confessed his conversion in a speech at Jerry Falwell's megachurch in Lynchburg, Virginia. He told the congregation that he had “walked through the valley of the shadow of death” and proclaimed, “I am healed by the grace of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.”

Wallace turned to those he had wronged, including John Lewisthe civil rights activist whose skull had been smashed by Wallace's state police in Selma in 1965. Lewis was moved by their meeting in 1979.

“During that meeting, I could see that he was a different person. He was campaigning to seek forgiveness from the same African Americans he had oppressed,” Lewis said. wrote for the New York Times in 1998“He admitted his bigotry and took responsibility for the harm he had caused. He wanted forgiveness.”

Voter votes

Politics has been Wallace's life since he was first elected to the Alabama legislature in 1946. Even after he was nearly killed on the campaign trail, he could barely breathe without it.

“I don’t think he needs a family,” his second wife Cornelia commented in the midst of a bitter divorce in 1978. “He just needs an audience.”

Wallace's segregationist image was apparently a product of politics. As a student and aspiring politician, he was progressive by southern standards: he avoided racial hatred and called for greater support for public services that benefited the working class in Alabama.

Years later, Ruth Johnson, whose husband Frank became a civil rights campaigner as a federal judge, remembered Wallace as a school friend. “We were young and idealistic,” Ruth remembered“And we loved George for his enthusiasm.”

In the late Forties and Nineteen Fifties, Wallace rejected extremism. He refused to Dixiecrat Rebellion against the Democratic Party’s civil rights program on the 1948 Democratic Convention. And he had the fame of fair treatment with black lawyers and plaintiffs during his years as a state judge.

That modified after he lost the Democratic nomination for governor in 1958 to a rival who courted the Ku Klux Klan and openly appealed to white racism. As the South was in flames and the civil rights movement gained momentum, Wallace won the election in 1962 as a staunch segregationist.

“Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever,” he declared in his inaugural speech in 1963. Wallace physically confronted an assistant U.S. attorney general and federal marshals as they attempted to implement a court order admitting a black woman to the University of Alabama.

At national level

Wallace was ambitious and sensed that racism was not limited to the South. During his first term as governor, he ran in three Democratic primaries in 1964. After leaving office in 1967, he launched an unsuccessful third-party bid for president in 1968.

He was re-elected governor in 1970 and ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1972 until he was nearly assassinated. Despite his injuries, he remained in office, won a 3rd term, and remained in office until 1979.

In 1983, as Wallace's physical and mental health deteriorated, he won a fourth term as governor. Being within the highlight was “a matter of life and death” for himnoted a long-time consultant.

The South had modified due to the movement that Wallace fought so fiercely, and blacks had turn into a serious force within the Democratic Party. Wallace, at all times a politician, was changing too. Appointment of black politicians in any respect levels of his government.

Wallace was no saint. Two marriages resulted in divorce, partly due to his emotional abuse of his wives.

Spike Lee’s documentary “4 little girls,” which chronicles the 1963 white supremacist bombing of the sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, that killed 4 black children, includes harrowing interviews with Wallace. They reveal a person who treated black individuals who worked for him in an embarrassingly condescending manner within the Nineteen Eighties.

Still, Wallace reflected, repented, and asked for forgiveness. That is price remembering at a time when a lot of us hope our flesh pressers will come to their senses and perhaps even change.