Alabama Gov. George Wallace
A cold cigar lay on the edge of the littered desk. Sitting behind the desk, Alabama's Governor George Corley Wallace, 44, seemed charged with electric intensity. His eyes, burning like lasers, were dark, deep, and eyebrowed over with black bands. His voice was deceptively soft, grace-noted with a Southern drawl, yet tinged with anxiety.
"I deplore violence," said Wallace. He reached for a pack of Dentyne and put a piece in his mouth. "But who started all this violence? There's a lot of agitators and the Communist Party mixed up in this picture, and people pooh-poohing around sitting up in their ivory towers, a bunch of sissy britches." He paused. "I don't believe just because somebody has a grievance that you should destroy the whole fabric of the Constitution, of private property. You don't burn the house down to destroy a rat." Wallace stood up and walked about the office. "If they go ahead," he said, "they will destroy a lot more than they realize."
"Why Did He Do It?" When he talks like that, Wallace sounds like an ordinary Alabama redneck. But he is no such thing—and the more's the pity, since he has become an international symbol of the demagogic segregationist in the Southern region of the U.S. Wallace is in fact a smart, capable lawyer who has in many ways been a first-rate Governor. Since he took office last January, he has pushed through sizable raises in teachers' salaries, begun a big school-construction program, successfully sponsored a $100 million bond issue for roads, cut his own executive department budget by better than $100,000 a year, and—according to statistics that he loves to flourish—persuaded some $250 million worth of new industry to locate in Alabama.
But on the question of civil rights, Wallace is a much different man. He combines the zeal of the true believer with the politician's sharp eye for the success that a segregationist stand can bring in the South. He has deliberately defied the law of the land. He has deliberately sought showdown confrontations with the Federal Government. When those showdowns came, he without exception retreated—as he knew all the while he would have to.
Yet in the wake of his retreats he has left passions that could lead only to such sickening crimes as Birmingham's Sunday school bombing. Today, many Alabamians who yield nothing to Wallace in their devotion to segregation accuse him of bringing about the bombing almost as surely as if he himself had planted the dynamite sticks. Says Birmingham Real Estate Dealer Sidney Smyer, 66, a lifelong segregationist and former state legislator who in recent months has tried to act as a mediator in his city's racial disputes: "There wouldn't have been any trouble if Wallace had stayed out. Why did he do it? Why didn't he let us alone?"