By Neil Earle
“Race,” the recently departed Studs Terkel once wrote, “is the American obsession.”
Perhaps that observation can stand to be revised somewhat.
The election of Barack Obama to the Presidency has not only assuaged the worries of many grim pundits and worried observers relative to race prejudice in the United States, but it also triggered a somewhat startling commentary by Peggy Wallace Kennedy on CNN Online (November 5, 2008). Mrs. Kennedy is the daughter of George Wallace. Wallace, of course, was the governor of Alabama and the man who famously “stood in the doorway” impeding the passage of two black students to the University of Alabama in 1963. That picture has become part of the pantheon of the Civil Rights struggle, even if the governor was clearly grandstanding and walked away quietly when he had made his protest.
The subject of a PBS documentary in 2000, Wallace was supposed to have changed his mind greatly on matters of race in later years (Life: Century of Change, page 229). Governor Wallace received 10,000,000 votes for President in 1968 on an anti-integration platform and was shot in the election of 1972 by a would-be assassin. He was confined to a wheelchair until his death in 1998. After a third failed Presidential bid in 1976, he slowly disappeared from the national spotlight remembered mostly for his “Stand in the Schoolhouse Door.” Bob Dylan alluded to this in his 1960s song “The Times They Are 'a Changin” which sang in part:
“Come Senators,
Congressmen please heed the call,
Don’t stand in the
doorways don’t block up the hall.”
Then, screaming at us with the speed of B-L-O-G came Peggy Wallace Kennedy’s timely remembrance. She registered the opinion that there would be “a substantial chance” that her father would, like her, vote for Barack Obama. She admitted to being “mesmerized” by Obama’s speech in 2004 at the Democratic national Convention.
If Mrs. Kennedy is right, her commentary is well worth remembering. She is providing eyewitness testimony for the governor who once vociferously proclaimed, “Segregation now! Segregation forever!” Mrs. Kennedy wrote: “My father lived long enough to come to an understanding of the injustices borne by his deeds and the legacy of suffering that they left behind.” Her father became a born-again Christian in the late 1970s and his 1983-1987 term as governor was marked by a record number of black appointments to high office.
Mrs. Kennedy herself was a supporter of Barack Obama and testified that the governor who listened to “reports of brutality” streaming into the Governor’s mansion from Selma, Alabama in 1965 was “not the same man” later in life. She recalls him as the wheelchair-bound leader who “rolled through a sea of African-American men, women and children who gathered with him to welcome another generation of marchers,” this time reenacting “in honor and remembrance” the route from Selma to Montgomery.
For those of us who lived through those tumultuous days, Peggy Kennedy’s remarks are historic, even sublime. We need to remember the journey ex-Governor George Wallace apparently made in his own mind on the subject of race. Someone said after Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, “So, the world does move.”
It does. It does indeed. Let’s all remember that when we think the world can’t change.